The Ninth Step (13 page)

The observers parted when Cornell’s cellmate approached. The massive Aryan snatched the game controller away from Cornell and said, “Game over, droop lip.” On the screen, Luigi fell over a cliff, screaming, “
Mama mia!
”

Now Cornell had seen
Oz
on his stolen HBO, and he knew that this situation would mark him either as everybody’s target or as a fighter not to be messed with.

“Now, now. If you want to play, you only need but ask. No need for personal insults. For instance, I would never dream of mentioning the urine stain on the front of your pants. A toileting accident of some kind, I would imagine.”

The Aryan shifted his belly to afford himself a view of his
own crotch. At that moment, Cornell rocketed upward and grabbed hold of the joystick. He shoved with every bit of strength that he had and rammed the joystick straight into the Aryan’s mouth. A vicious knee straight into the giant’s crotch brought him to his knees. From that position, Cornell began to hammer the joystick into the man’s mouth, the force of the blows taking the Aryan the rest of the way to the floor. Cornell kept hammering, and he thought he felt a tooth break. Maybe two.

He kept pounding, skull-fucking the son of a bitch with the joystick. The other inmates whooped and hollered. When he heard someone say, “Guard,” Cornell climbed off and joined the circle of onlookers.

As his days wore on, Cornell enjoyed the freedom that his one act of bravado had purchased him. He could move around freely—within reason.

He sat by himself in the dirt of the exercise yard and watched a group of black inmates lifting weights. He sat at the outskirts of what they would have considered their space. What drew him to them was that quite a few of these men were missing teeth, and, unlike Cornell, their missing teeth had been replaced with gold, silver, and platinum ones.

Cornell had read one book during the thirty-five years of his life. That book was
The Great Gatsby
. He had been in a state-run boys’ home at the time, and all the older kids had been assigned that book to read for English class. Cornell saw the book everywhere. Not having a copy made him feel left out. So he stole one.
And he read it. He read it proudly, out in the open, so he could be observed in the reading of it (except by the original owner). He had started by just pretending to read it, to belong to the group he considered somehow elite, but the damnedest thing happened. He didn’t so much fall in love with the book as he fell in love with Jay Gatsby. Jay Gatsby was the shit. Jay Gatsby had started with nothing, just a poor kid in love with some girl. Jay Gatsby became rich. He broke a few rules along the way, a few shady deals, but he did it. He didn’t really get the girl in the end, but still he made out all right. Besides, the girl, Daisy, was a stone-cold killer. Gatsby was all right. And more than anything else, he liked the way Gatsby talked. It was all
old sport
this and
old sport
that, but if you replaced
old sport
with
fuckwad
—it made perfect sense. Yep, Gatsby was the shit. And that was how Cornell saw himself. Just still stuck in poor mode. And, Cornell was certain, should Jay Gatsby lose a tooth or two, he’d replace them with gold.

For some, such an anecdote might be the preamble to a lifelong love affair with literature, but this was not the case with Cornell. No, one book was plenty, thank you.

And so Cornell Smith sat in the dirt and watched the black inmates build their muscles, their gold teeth and platinum grills glinting in the sun.

He picked up a twig and scratched the numbers in the dirt.

Cornell gathered his few belongings. A guard waited for him just outside the open cell door. The days had been slow to pass, but they had passed.

Carrying his things out the door, Cornell stopped and went back to his cellmate, stretched out on the bottom bunk.

Cornell inserted his finger into the Aryan’s mouth, probing the toothless opening.

“Smooth. Old sport.”

Cornell signed the release form, and the female correctional officer pushed a manila envelope under the chain-link screen. He opened the envelope and withdrew his wallet and keys. His fingers dug around the bottom and scooped out a crumpled scrap of paper. It was Mrs. Woolrich’s Walgreens receipt. Yes, he knew her name. He knew where she lived. Inmates weren’t allowed Internet access, but one guy had a contraband BlackBerry. Cornell had paid him twenty dollars to do a reverse lookup of the memorized phone number. In less than fifteen seconds, he had the name Edgar Woolrich and a Mantissa Cove address. There was something about that name. Cornell could swear he knew an Edgar Woolrich, but he couldn’t place him. It was a memory that was just out of reach, tantalizing him.

Lastly, Cornell found the pack of chewing gum in the envelope. He unwrapped it and inserted a flat rectangular piece into his slack mouth.

The trailer was paid for free and clear, and the lot was paid for up front every six months, so paying the rent hadn’t been an issue.

Cornell was greeted by stale musty air when he entered his double-wide, carrying a twelve-pack of Natural Light—the post-incarceration beer of choice.

The electricity was flowing thanks to a four-hundred-yard length of power cable patched in to his closest neighbor’s transformer. He lit a cigarette, flipped on the television (a satellite hack he’d purchased at a pawnshop), and settled down on the couch. An old movie from the seventies was playing. He’d seen it before. Jodie Foster was just a kid in this one. She had killed her parents or something like that and was living the life. Except Martin Sheen was snooping around. Wouldn’t leave her alone. He was some kind of child molester or something. This was the part where she was giving old Martin some cyanide-laced tea. Tastes of almonds, he said. That’s just the almond cookies, young Jodie reassured him.

Cornell studied the drugstore receipt. He added to it the piece of paper on which he had written Edgar Woolrich’s name, address, and phone number. That name. It still bothered him. He got up and went to the bathroom. In the cabinet under the sink, Cornell found the newspaper he had been holding on to for well over a year. He hadn’t studied it or obsessed over it. He did not return to it from time to time to contemplate or explore shades of guilt and culpability. But he
had
saved it. Yes, he had saved it. He opened the paper to the article about the fatal hit-and-run accident. It featured a photograph of Edgar and Judy Woolrich. The photo had come from a Teacher of the Year award ceremony.

Edgar and Judy Woolrich. What the fuck was going on here?

Cornell looked at himself in the toothpaste-spattered mirror. The scar on his forehead was pink and stood out in contrast with his pale skin. He touched it, remembering. Drunken laughter. Loud music. Groping hands. Their car drifting into the oncoming lane. The laughter cut short as white light welled up in the car. Picking glass out of his bleeding forehead. Turning and spitting his teeth into the backseat in a stream of blood and thick saliva. And seeing the other car, overturned and lying in the ditch. And mumbled words.

We’ve got to go.

What?

Now!

What happened?

We’ve got to go. Now!

The images and the words faded from his mind, and Cornell was left with only his own image reflected in the mirror. He grinned. He suspected there was opportunity here, although he still did not understand what exactly had transpired.

He noticed that his hair had grown out considerably. The dirty-blond roots clashed with the deep black. Especially at the widow’s peak. From the cabinet drawer he took a black Magic Marker and began the chore of touching up his roots.

From a gas station, Cornell called the phone number. A man, presumably Edgar Woolrich, answered. Cornell inquired about the car for sale.

“The car was sold several months ago.”

“Oh. A friend of mine talked to the lady. Judy Woolrich?”

There was a long pause. Then: “No. Helen. Helen Woolrich. It’s sold. Good-bye.”

He parked a safe distance away. Using the binoculars he’d five-finger-discounted at Goodwill, Cornell watched Edgar Woolrich string Christmas lights along the eaves of his house. The woman he’d followed at Walgreens (Helen Woolrich?) held the ladder for him. Her lower abdomen was heavy and swollen.

Cornell held up the newspaper photo and compared. The man was clearly Edgar Woolrich. No doubt about it. Helen, his Helen, had replaced the deceased Judy Woolrich.

What the fuck, old sport?

Cornell grinned, exposing his toothless gap.

What the fuck indeed.

She was still somewhat disconcerted by the sudden emergence of her belly. She hadn’t shown at all for most of the first five months, and now coming into her sixth month, seemingly overnight, she was sporting a good size belly.

As she reached down to retrieve the Saturday mail that had fallen through the front door slot, Helen lost sight of it because of her protruding stomach and scooped it up blindly.

She tossed the mail onto the foyer table without looking at it. Edgar was the bill payer, and so she did not see that one of the mail pieces was addressed to Helen Woolrich in thick block letters.

Helen returned to the living room, where she had been hanging glass ornaments on the Christmas tree.

Mitzi watched Edgar squint through his bifocals as he methodically examined a string of old-fashioned blue cluster lights that he could not get to light. He visually inspected and reset each bulb, plugging and unplugging the strand, but with no success. He finally saw that one of the clusters was missing a tiny bulb.

“Found it. Missing bulb. These are wired to not light if there’s a bulb missing. Safety feature. We don’t have anything to replace it with.”

“Maybe you should just throw them out. Get the new LED kind.”

Edgar fingered the empty socket, frowning.

“Edgar. Really. Just throw them out.”

There was a time that Edgar would not have been able to let something like that go. A time when he would have combed the house for that missing bulb. Instead, he took the string of lights to the kitchen and shoved them into the trash can.

When he came back, Helen handed him the tinsel-encrusted angel, and Edgar placed it perfectly atop the tree.

Later, while Helen was snuggled up under an afghan, an empty bag of microwave popcorn on the floor beside her, watching
It’s a Wonderful Life
, Edgar grabbed the mail and sat down on the couch between Helen and Mitzi. He rubbed Mitzi behind her ears in the spot she liked best. He liked the dog just fine, but the cats had been a big adjustment for him. Agnes, a sinewy yellow tabby (that Helen said was actually called an orange tabby, or red if you wanted to be technical), generally kept her distance. But the other one, Molly, a striking black-and-
white with spooky green eyes, had taken a shine to him. Whenever Edgar sat down or in any way created a horizontal plane with his body, Molly positioned herself there, purring and rubbing. Sometimes, in the dead of night, Edgar would awaken to find the cat butting his forehead with hers. Edgar held the mail higher above his lap than he would have normally liked—to make sure Molly had room to curl up there. It was an adjustment. As were the litter boxes.

Normally, going through the mail was a chore reserved for his desk, but Edgar wanted to be on the couch with Helen near the tree and the animals. He carefully slit open each envelope. He did this to the one addressed to Helen. He was in the act of prying it open and extracting its contents when he saw that it was addressed to her.

He tossed it to her.

Helen sat up a little, not wanting to come too far out from under the afghan. She opened the envelope and extracted a small piece of paper. It was a Walgreens sales receipt. For three citronella candles, a pair of earrings, and one home pregnancy test kit. The receipt was dated over five months ago. She knew immediately what it was and who had sent it.

She turned the receipt over and saw on the back, penciled in block letters:
DOES HE KNOW YOU KILLED HIS WIFE?

Helen’s body stiffened and her mind went gray.

“What is it?”

Helen was unable to respond.

“Helen?”

She broke her eyes away from the words, pulled her mind
from the opaque grayness that had swallowed it. She couldn’t quite find her voice, so she looked at Edgar and raised her eyebrows.

“What is it?”

“Oh. It’s uh—it’s an old bill.”

Edgar reached for it.

Helen pulled back.

“Give it to me. I’ll pay it.”

“No. I mean it—it’s actually a receipt, see?”

She held the face of it out for Edgar to see, in the spot where she knew neither prism of his bifocals could focus very well. Edgar squinted and nodded.

“I must have left it at the store and they mailed it to me.”

“That’s odd.”

Helen placed the receipt back in the envelope and tossed it on the coffee table as though it meant absolutely nothing to her.

“I guess some people are just very thorough.”

“I can relate,” Edgar said, grinning. He rubbed her pregnant stomach. “Want some more popcorn?”

“You know what? I do.”

Edgar grabbed the empty bag off the floor and headed into the kitchen to make more popcorn.

Helen stared at the envelope, afraid to move, afraid to take her eyes off it, as though it were a king cobra poised to strike.

From the kitchen, Edgar called out, “But I wonder how they got your address? Odd.”

“Yeah, that is odd. It’s from when I bought the pregnancy test.”
Why did she say that? That just made it seem even weirder.

Helen heard the electronic beeps of microwave buttons being pressed. She slowly reached her arm out toward the envelope, never taking her eyes off it, like an Indian snake charmer. She heard Edgar returning from the kitchen and jerked her hand back.

Edgar cleared all the mail from the coffee table—leaving Helen’s envelope. He made it halfway to his desk before turning on his heels.