“Somebody’s feelin it!” a voice shouted.
Shouts and cackles of laughter greeted this sally. To Morris it sounded as if he were locked up in a zoo, and he supposed he was, only this was the kind where the cages held humans. The orange jumpsuit he was wearing proved it.
How had he gotten here?
He couldn’t remember, any more than he could remember how he’d gotten into the house he’d trashed in Sugar Heights. What he could remember was his own house, on Sycamore Street. And the trunk, of course. Burying the trunk. There had been money in his pocket, two hundred dollars of John Rothstein’s money, and he had gone down to Zoney’s to get a couple of beers because his head ached and he was feeling lonely. He had talked to the clerk, he was pretty sure of that, but he couldn’t remember what they had discussed. Baseball? Probably not. He had a Groundhogs cap, but that was as far as his interest went. After that, almost nothing. All he could be sure of was that something had gone horribly wrong. When you woke up wearing an orange jumpsuit, that was an easy deduction to make.
He crawled back to the bunk, pulled himself up, drew his knees to his chest, and clasped his hands around them. It was cold in the cell. He began to shiver.
I might have asked that clerk what his favorite bar was. One I could get to on the bus. And I went there, didn’t I? Went there and got drunk. In spite of all I know about what it does to me. Not just a little loaded, either—standing-up, falling-down shitfaced drunk.
Oh yes, undoubtedly, in spite of all he knew. Which was bad, but he couldn’t remember the crazy things afterwards, and that was worse. After the third drink (sometimes only second), he fell down a dark hole and didn’t climb back out until he woke up hungover but sober. Blackout drinking was what they called it. And in those blackouts, he almost always got up to . . . well, call it hijinks. Hijinks was how he’d ended up in Riverview Youth Detention, and doubtless how he’d ended up here. Wherever here was.
Hijinks.
Fucking hijinks.
Morris hoped it had been a good old-fashioned bar fight and not more breaking and entering. Not a repeat of his Sugar Heights adventure, in other words. Because he was well past his teenage years now and it wouldn’t be the reformatory this time, no sir. Still, he would do the time if he had done the crime. Just as long as the crime had nothing to do with the murder of a certain genius American writer, please God. If it did, he would not be breathing free air again for a long time. Maybe never. Because it wasn’t just Rothstein, was it? And now a memory did arise: Curtis Rogers asking if New Hampshire had the death penalty.
Morris lay on the bunk, shivering, thinking, That can’t be why I’m here. It can’t.
Can it?
He had to admit that it was possible, and not just because the police might have put him together with the dead men in the rest area. He could see himself in a bar or a stripjoint somewhere, Morris Bellamy, the college dropout and self-proclaimed American lit scholar, tossing back bourbon and having an out-of-body experience. Someone starts talking about the murder of John Rothstein, the great writer, the reclusive American genius, and Morris Bellamy—drunk off his tits and full of that huge anger he usually kept locked in a cage, that black beast with the yellow eyes—turning to the speaker and saying, He didn’t look much like a genius when I blew his head off.
“I would never,” he whispered. His head was aching worse than ever, and there was something wrong on the left side of his face, too. It burned. “I would never.”
Only how did he know that? When he drank, any day was Anything Can Happen Day. The black beast came out. As a teenager the beast had rampaged through that house in Sugar Heights, tearing the motherfucker pretty much to shreds, and when the cops responded to the silent alarm he had fought them until one belted him unconscious with his nightstick, and when they searched him they found a shitload of jewelry in his pockets, much of it of the costume variety but some, carelessly left out of madame’s safe, extraordinarily valuable, and howdy-do, off we go to Riverview, where we will get our tender young buttsky reamed and make exciting new friends.
He thought, The person who put on a shit-show like that is perfectly capable of boasting while drunk about murdering Jimmy Gold’s creator, and you know it.
Although it could have been the cops, too. If they had ID’d him and put out an APB. That was just as likely.
“I need a lover who won’t drive me cray-zee!”
“Shut up!” This time it was Morris himself, and he tried to yell it, but what came out was nothing but a puke-clotted croak. Oh, his head hurt. And his face, yow. He ran a hand up his left cheek and stared stupidly at the flakes of dried blood in his palm. He explored again and felt scratches there, at least three of them. Fingernail scratches, and deep. What does that tell us, class? Well, ordinarily—although there are exceptions to every rule—men punch and women scratch. The ladies do it with their nails because more often than not they have nice long ones to scratch with.
Did I try to slap the make on some twist, and she refused me with her nails?
Morris tried to remember and couldn’t. He remembered the rain, the poncho, and the flashlight shining on the roots. He remembered the pick. He sort of remembered wanting to hear fast loud music and talking to the clerk at Zoney’s Go-Mart. After that? Just darkness.
He thought, Maybe it was the car. That damn Biscayne. Maybe somebody saw it coming out of the rest area on Route 92 with the front end all bloody on the right, and maybe I left something in the glove compartment. Something with my name on it.
But that didn’t seem likely. Freddy had purchased the Chevy from a half-drunk bar-bitch in a Lynn taproom, paying with money the three of them had pooled. She had signed over the pink to Harold Fineman, which happened to be the name of Jimmy Gold’s best friend in The Runner. She had never seen Morris Bellamy, who knew enough to stay out of sight while that particular deal went down. Besides, Morris had done everything but soap PLEASE STEAL ME on the windshield when he left it at the mall. No, the Biscayne was now sitting in a vacant lot somewhere, either in Lowtown or down by the lake, stripped to the axles.
So how did I wind up here? Back to that, like a rat running on a wheel. If some woman marked my face with her nails, did I haul off on her? Maybe break her jaw?