Ugly As Sin (4 page)

Almost immediately, upon receiving the news, Nick began to distance himself from this young lady he once thought he loved more than anything else in the world.

The moment she informed him that he was going to be a father, things
changed
.

He wasn’t proud of it. But that was who he had been back then. The Nick Bullman of three decades ago—the hungry kid who had worked so hard to prove to his superiors and the fans that he would one day be the best in the Biz—hadn’t been willing to slam on the brakes so abruptly. He refused to put his dreams on hold in order to accept this new responsibility.

He wasn’t ready to be a father. A husband. A nobody. He was ready to be a
star
.

He had tried to rationalize his behavior. Tried to convince himself, even as he failed to show up again and again when he promised to visit Arlene and little Melissa, that he was doing the right thing. Giving fatherhood his best shot, while keeping his eyes on the Big Picture.

Hard to be a devoted family man, though, when you’re in Hawaii one week, Tokyo the next. Meanwhile, said family sits in their drafty mobile home in the mountains of North Carolina, waiting for your call.

The years sped by, and while Nick never vanished completely from his daughter’s life, the occasions when he did make time for her grew further and further apart. Eventually, Arlene moved on. She told him she could no longer commit herself to a man who might as well have been a ghost, a man who had severed ties with those who loved him because the only person in the world he ever truly cared about was
himself
.

In what felt like the blink of an eye, Nick Bullman’s little girl was no longer a little girl at all.

The last time he had seen his daughter she was nineteen years old. Now her thirtieth birthday was just a few months away. If he remembered correctly.

His regret was like some parasitic worm coiled inside of him. It had been dormant for a while, but now it awoke to feed again.

A sniffle on the other end of the line brought him back to the present: “Daddy? Are you there?”

“I’m here,” Nick replied.

His voice was a pitiful croak. He cleared his throat, said it again.

“Yeah, baby...I’m here.”

†

“Daddy, I need you.”

“Melissa...”

Her voice grew thick, wet, nearly unintelligible, and beneath her tears she was obviously talking more to herself than to him at first: “Don’t know what the hell I was thinking...oughta have my head examined for getting mixed up with him in the first place...”

“Melissa, what’s going on? Did somebody hurt you?”

“I wish you could drive out here. I wish you could come right now. It’s a lot to ask, I know, but...do you think you could?” She sounded lost, alone, more like a terrified child than a woman on the brink of turning thirty. “I didn’t know who else to call.
Please
, Daddy...”

Her whole life, he’d been Missing In Action. Nick Bullman didn’t know his daughter’s favorite food, what she did for a living, or her most cherished childhood memory. They were barely more than strangers. But she was his blood.

“Can you come? Please?” she asked him again.

Her sobs wrenched at his heart.

Nick took a long look around his apartment: at the bile-colored sofa with its foam guts leaking out...at the wide brown water stain on the ceiling that grew bigger every day...at the two fat bluebottle flies fucking on a dust-covered windowsill. He sighed, knew he could turn his back on all of it. His boss would probably raise hell if he asked for a few days off. Then again, Nick wasn’t entirely sure if he still had his gig at the Cherry Pit (two days ago a regular had complained to management about how he came to spend his dough on pretty girls but it was “hard to get in the mood with a bouncer standing nearby whose face looked like a plate of raw hamburger”).

After McDougal’s lawsuit wiped him out, Nick could no longer lay claim to a hefty nest egg sitting in the bank. Nothing substantial, anyway. But he supposed he could afford to leave town for a little while. Assuming his piece-of-shit Bronco didn’t break down somewhere on the side of I-40.

In less than a minute, his decision was made. His daughter needed him. For once, by God, he would be there for her.

“Where are you, hon? Do you still live in Midnight?”

“I do,” she said. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but—”

“Where should we meet? Got a nine-hour drive ahead of me. I leave now, I can be there before dark.”

†

He pulled into Midnight, North Carolina around five-thirty that evening. He didn’t know how long he would be needed here, so he had packed enough clothes to last him a week. The old gym bag sat beside him on the Bronco’s passenger seat like his only friend in the world. On the truck’s CD player, Howlin’ Wolf insisted he was built for comfort, not for speed.

Moments after Nick passed the sign welcoming him to Midnight (he noticed the subscript that once boasted BIRTHPLACE OF TV WRESTLER NICK BULLMAN! was gone now, presumably since around the time his own face was erased), he found himself overwhelmed by how much everything had changed. At the corner of First and Main, the old Midnight Drug & Sundry had been replaced by a massive bank with fancy mirrored windows. A block further down, where Hank’s Hobby Shop and Corriher Guns n’ Ammo once sat side by side, he saw a Jiffy Lube, a Domino’s Pizza, and a Chinese take-out joint. The Big Pig Grocery had become a sprawling used-car lot. Old Man Dickerson’s newsstand, where young Nick Bullman used to buy his beloved Superman comic books, was now a Radio Shack. Though it didn’t surprise him at all to see that the Lansdale Drive-In Theater was gone, he couldn’t help but feel a sharp pang of disappointment when he passed the Wal-Mart in its place.

Nick shook his head as he took it all in, his lipless mouth pinching together into something resembling a sad smile.

When he at last reached his destination, he took a deep breath, let it out slowly. On the phone, his daughter had asked him if he remembered where he had taken her for dinner on her thirteenth birthday (she didn’t remind him that this was the last time he had acknowledged her birthday at all, but she didn’t have to). He did recall the place, and he had agreed to meet her at that address. He expected to see a Subway or a Burger King sitting there at the south end of Main Street. He couldn’t believe Annie’s Country Diner was still around.

He parked in front of the restaurant, between a gray utility van and a mud-spattered pickup with a gun rack in the rear window.

He turned off the Bronco’s ignition. Realized his hands were shaking as he pulled his handkerchief from his back pocket and dabbed at his leaking right eye.

For several minutes he just sat there, wondering what the hell he was going to say to his daughter after so many years.

Finally, he pulled his hood over his head, and climbed out of the vehicle.

†

The place smelled like fried chicken and coffee.
Not
two of Nick’s favorite smells: when he was a kid, his father used to task him with beheading the birds on their farm, and ever since then the aroma of frying chicken made him sick to his stomach; likewise, he had never developed a taste for java, unlike just about everyone else he had ever known.

There were a dozen or so customers in the diner. At least half of them turned to stare as he entered. Conversations halted, and for several seconds the only sounds were the grill sizzling in the kitchen and a cook’s voice calling out from back there: “Chuckwagon plate’s up, Brenda!” The people who had stopped eating to gawk at Nick did not return to their meals right away. A young mother pinched her son’s forearm, admonishing him about how it wasn’t polite to stare. At the bar beside the cash register, a dreadlocked twenty-something in a tie-dyed T-shirt mumbled “oh, that poor individual” to his chubby girlfriend, but when he swiveled back around on his stool he slid his plate of corned beef hash to one side.

A waitress passed by, and without looking in Nick’s direction she said, “Seat yourself, be with ya soon as I can.” She was a living, breathing cliché with her orange hairdo, her rumpled uniform, the way she smacked at her gum like a cow working at a mouthful of cud.

“No problem.” Behind his dark glasses, Nick’s eyes skimmed the restaurant. “I’m meeting someone.”

The waitress had already moved on, and was catering to the culinary needs of three burly rednecks. She cackled loudly as one of the men said something hilarious, pulled her down onto his lap.

Nick didn’t need her anyway. Because a moment later he found who he was looking for.

She sat in a corner booth. Her back was turned to him. He could not see his daughter’s face. But he
knew
her. As if via some sixth sense, blood drawn to blood.

She wore a faded denim jacket with a small rip in the left shoulder. A cloud of cigarette smoke hovered over her table like a bad omen.

Slowly, Nick approached his daughter.

As he crossed the diner, he searched for something to do with his hands. They were two enormous slabs of meat that existed only to get in his way. He shoved them into the pockets of his jeans. Pulled them out. Shoved them back in.

When he at last stood over her, he cleared his throat.

She turned to face him.

Nick barely caught himself—his initial instinct was not unlike the averted-eyes reaction so many people gave
him
these days, when they saw his mangled features.

She was twenty-nine. But she looked at least ten years older than that.

Sitting before him, Nick knew, was a soul defeated. Someone to whom life had been unkind.

An icy fist squeezed his heart as she slid out of the booth and wrapped her arms around him.

“You, uh, wanna sit down?” she said when that was done.

She took her seat again, and he crammed his bulk into the opposite side of the booth.

Right away, Nick noticed that his daughter didn’t seem fazed by his appearance. He found that odd. She
was
aware of what had happened to him three years ago—he had received word after the fact that she had called to check on him while he was in the hospital—but this was the first time Melissa had seen for herself the grisly results of his encounter with Rebel Yell and One-Arm. Perhaps whatever was troubling her was so awful she barely recognized the extent of her father’s disfigurement. Or she simply did not care.

Why the hell should she?
Nick thought.

She sat there staring at a cup of coffee in front of her as if it held the answers to all of her problems. A cigarette burned in an overflowing ashtray in the center of the table.

She wore no makeup. Faint acne scars dotted her cheeks and forehead. Her dark brown hair looked as if she had last washed it weeks ago. Nick reached across the table, gently pushed several oily strands of it out of her face.

She flinched when he touched her. But then she offered him a halfhearted smile. A smile that did not reach her eyes.

“Melissa, tell me what’s going on.”

She sniffled, turned to stare out the restaurant’s plate-glass window. Across the street sat the white-brick building that housed the adjacent offices of the
Midnight Sun
and the Polk County Sheriff’s Department. The way she looked at the latter made Nick think of a junkie gazing upon her next fix, if said fix was located on the opposite side of a bottomless rift.

His big hands reached for hers. “Talk to me, girl. I’m here.”

“You’ll never know how much this means to me.” She continued to stare out the window, and her pale reflection gazed back like a phantom voyeur eavesdropping on their awkward reunion. “Your coming here, I mean.”

“It’s the least I could do,” said Nick.

“I didn’t want to bother you, Daddy. But I didn’t know who else to call.”

He shifted in his seat, and now he stared out the window with her. He cleared his throat again. “There is, um, one thing. Before we go any further.”

“What?”

“I was thinking...maybe you shouldn’t call me that. You know I don’t deserve it.”

She took a drag off her cigarette. He noticed her fingernails were chewed down into the quick.

“After all this time, it doesn’t feel right, does it?” he asked her. “I don’t mind if you call me Nick. I think that might be best.”

She shrugged, exhaled a wisp of smoke from one side of her mouth. Her tone was slightly defiant, or perhaps she was simply too tired to argue. “I’m a big girl. It’s not a huge deal.”

“Somebody who was there for you, did the things fathers are supposed to do, he deserves to be called Daddy. Not me. That fella your momma married, what’s his name again?”

“Warren.”

“He took care of you, when I was off acting like an asshole. You should call him Dad.”

“Warren was a pervert. And he died in that car accident the year after Mom got cancer.”

Nick would have winced if his ruined features allowed it. “I’m sorry.”

They were both quiet for the next minute or two. Nick’s heart felt heavier than ever.

The orange-haired waitress appeared before their table. “Did ya need to see a menu?” she asked Nick, although her eyes were glued to the order pad in her hand.

“Nothing for me.”

“Refill your coffee?”

Nick’s daughter gave a barely perceptible shake of her head. She took one last drag off her cigarette, snubbed it out.

“I’ll get your check, then.”

The moment they were alone again, Melissa buried her face in her hands and started sobbing.

Nick sensed the other customers watching them, but he couldn’t have cared less. He removed his sunglasses, looked into his daughter’s swollen red eyes. This time she allowed his giant hands to engulf her own.

“I want to help you, Melissa, but I can’t do that unless you tell me what’s wrong.”

“Somebody took her,” she cried. “They took my Sophie away, and I don’t know whether she’s alive or dead. For all I know she could be lying in a ditch somewhere, raped and...murdered. And it’s...all my fault...”

“What are you talking about? Who is Sophie?”