After the UPS packages and mail piled up and the dogs kept howling, somebody calls the cops out. When they get to the front door, the smell’s unmistakable. They find the guy in the den, or what’s left of him, hanging from a rope, maybe a couple of feet off the floor. The dogs had likely tried to find a way out for a while. Maybe he’d even left a door open for them but the wind blew it shut (I try not to assume too much). But after four days of trying, well, there he was.
But that’s not the end. Turned out he was Bosnian. He’d immigrated during the height of the war there. After a while, the cops are looking in the kitchen and they notice how uneven the floor planks are, even for an old house. They’ve been replaced recently. They’re curious. Maybe someone had passed along a few of the neighborhood kids’ stories to them. Who knows? They decide to pry up a few of the wide planks, which are old cypress. Underneath, between the joists, partially buried in the dirt, they find a girl doll the size of an infant. Its eyes and genitals have been gouged out. The cops’ eyebrows rise. So they pull up other planks and find dozens more dolls laid similarly to rest, all with their eyes and genitals gouged out. So, of course, they combed the property after that, expecting to find the worst. They started digging in the backyard where a recent garden had gone in. They double-checked missing persons reports. They asked neighbors about the man. Of course now all the man’s actions—his reticence, his reckless driving and weird affect, even his gypsy fortune-teller in the red velvet box—seem suspicious. May be harbingers of something else. But weeks go by and no bodies are found. No little girls turn up missing.
Of course, the dogs have to be destroyed.
So for a long time after, I didn’t know how to feel about it. I felt partly responsible but I couldn’t say exactly how. I’d scared him by posing as someone else. Was he working his way up to real girls? Or was he just a troubled man who didn’t want his dogs taken away? Maybe he was fighting some terrible urge? One he’d kept in check for a long time, all the way back to Bosnia. Maybe he pretended so he didn’t have to do the real thing. Maybe what he did was even heroic? We’ll never know. Some stories don’t have an ending even if you want them to.
26
MICHAEL DROVE UP Lake Austin Boulevard toward his dad’s house. It was late. Alice was asleep in the backseat. He wasn’t exactly sure why he was going. The simplest answer was that he needed money for whatever was ahead. But his brother seemed somehow mixed up in it too. With a clearer head, he might have realized it also had to do with his dad’s girlfriend, Margo, whom he was a little in love with. Margo, who had bailed him out of jail several years before, who’d driven him to his probation hearing after a DUI, who’d lent him money (and inadvertently the bounty of her medicine cabinet) when his dad wouldn’t speak to him. Margo, who was pregnant again after losing the first one.
He pulled into his dad and Margo’s driveway and got out, careful not to wake Alice. The glow from the porch Christmas lights made everything seem temporary. He knocked several times and then Margo stood in the doorway in her robe, her belly bulging underneath. She squinted out at him, hoping to see ahead, he suspected, to whatever trouble he might have in tow. He wavered there unsteadily for a moment while she got her bearings. He’d woken her.
“Prodigal son,” Margo said in a cracked voice. “You have returned.” Michael said hello, smiled in a way that felt disconnected from his face.
She stared at him hard. “You look like shit.”
“Thanks.” Her robe hung open, and he could see her belly’s navel stem poking obscenely against her nightgown, which thrilled and embarrassed him. He tried not to look but looked anyway. She had on a necklace, a circle of small diamonds. Her hair was rapidly going gray.
Margo pulled her robe closed. She followed his eyes. “My hair?” She croaked out a laugh. “Blame your sibling.”
“For what?” For a few seconds Michael didn’t know what they were talking about.
“Hormones,” she said, smiling. “So where’s little Alice?” He motioned with his head and she peered out at his car in the driveway. Her shoulders fell and she seemed disappointed in him. “Bring her in. It’s getting cold out.”
He would make his way upstairs a little later, go through drawers, look for jewelry. He tried to remember where his dad kept the petty cash for his movie prop runs. He ran over in his mind the tools in the garage he might take and hock.
“You okay?” Margo said. Concern flickered through her face.
Michael thought of laying his head in Margo’s lap.