I knew that he was lying, but I wasn’t about to call him on it. I wanted to hear what he had to say about the events of the previous night.
“ JI slyiI saw a light, and I went around to the back door. There was a woman inside. I slipped my card under the door, and she slid it back. Then—”
He stopped.
“Go on,” I said.
“I heard a girl’s voice,” he continued, “but she was outside. I think the woman joined her at some point, but I didn’t look, so I can’t be sure.”
“Why didn’t you look?”
“I decided to leave.” His face, and those four words, spoke volumes.
“A wise choice. It’s just a shame that you were here in the first place.”
“I just wanted to see where you lived. I didn’t mean any harm by it.”
“No.”
He breathed in deeply, and once he was certain that he wasn’t going to throw up, he rallied and pulled himself up to his full height.
“Who were they?” he asked, and now it was my turn to lie.
“A friend. A friend and her daughter.”
“Your friend’s daughter always goes walking in the snow in dense fog, writing things on other people’s windows?”
“Writing? What are you talking about?”
Mickey swallowed hard. His right hand was trembling. His left was jammed in his coat pocket.
“There was something written on the window of my car when I got back to it,” he said. “It said ‘Stay away from my Daddy.’”
It took all of my self-control not to reveal myself to him. I wanted so badly to look up at the attic window, for I remembered a message written on the glass there, a warning left by an entity that was not quite my daughter. Yet the house did not feel the same way that it had felt then. It was no longer haunted by rage and grief and pain. Before, I had sensed their presence in the shifting of shadows and the creaking of boards, in the slow closing of doors where there was no breeze, and in the tapping on windows where there were no branches to touch them. Now the house was at peace, but if Wallace was speaking the truth, then something had returned.
I recalled my mother once telling me, some years after my father died, that on the night his body was taken to the church, she dreamed that she woke to a presence in the bedroom, and thought she could feel her husband close to her. In the far corner of the room there was a chair upon which he used to seat himself every night to finish undressing. He would ease himself into it in order to take off his shoes and socks, and sometimes he would remain there quietly for a while, his bare feet planted firmly on the carpet, his chin resting on the palms of his hands, and reflect upon the day that was coming to a close. My mother said that, in her dream, my father was back in his chair, except she couldn’t quite see him. When she tried to focus on the shape in the corner of the room, there was only a chair, but when she looked away a figure shifted position in the corner of her eye. She should have been frightened, but she was not. In her dream, her eyes became heavy. But how can my eyes be heavy, she thought, when I am still asleep? She fought against it, but the urge to sleep was too strong.
J thr d
And just as she lost consciousness, she felt a hand on her brow, and lips softly brushed her cheek, and she sensed his sorrow and guilt, and in that moment I think that perhaps she started to forgive him at last for what he had done. For the rest of the night, she slept soundly and deeply, and despite all that had occurred, she did not weep as the final prayers were said for him in the church, and when his body was at last lowered into the ground, and the flag was folded and laid in her hands, she smiled sadly for her lost man and a single tear fell to the earth and exploded in the dirt like a fallen star.
“My friend’s daughter,” I said, “playing tricks on you.”
“Really?” said Wallace, and he did not even try to keep the skepticism from his voice. “They still here?”
“No. They’re gone.”
He let it go. “That was a low thing you did. You always hit people without warning?”
“It comes from the line of work. If I had told some of them that I was going to hit them, they would have shot me first. A warning kind of dulls the impact.”
“You know, right now, I kind of wish someone had shot you.”
“At least you’re honest.”
“Is that why you called me out here, to warn me off again?”
“I’m sorry that I hit you, but you need to hear this face-to-face, and not in a bar either. I’m not going to help you with your book. In fact, I’ll do everything in my power to make sure that it never gets beyond some scratches in one of your notebooks.”
“You’re threatening me?”
“Mr. Wallace, do you recall the gentleman at the Bear who was discussing the possible motives of alien abductors?”
“I do. In fact, I met him again yesterday. He was waiting for me in the parking lot of my motel. I assumed that you’d sent him.”
Jackie. I should have known that he’d take matters into his own hands in some misguided effort to help me. Part of me even felt a kind of admiration for him. I wondered how long he’d spent trawling the parking lots of the city’s motels, looking for Wallace’s car.
“I didn’t, but he’s the kind of man who can’t easily be controlled, and he has two buddies who make him look like a gentle soul. They’re brothers, and there are prisons that don’t want them back because they frighten the other inmates.”
“So? You’re going to set your buddies on me. Tough guy.”
“If I wanted to hurt you that badly, I’d do it myself. There are other ways to deal with the kind of problem that you represent.”
“I’m not a problem. I just want to tell your story. I’m interested in the truth.”
“I don’t know what the truth is. If I don’t know after all this time, then you’re not going to have any more success than I’ve had.”
His eyes narrowed shrewdly, and some of the color returned to his face. J thot I had made a mistake even discussing the matter with him. He was like an evangelical Christian who finds someone on a doorstep willing to debate theology with him.
“But I can help you,” he said. “I’m a neutral party. I can find out things that might be useful to you. It doesn’t all have to go in the book. You’ll have control over how your image is presented.”
“My image?”
He realized that he had taken a wrong turn, and backpedaled furiously.
“It’s just a phrase. It means nothing. What I meant to say was, this is your story. If it’s to be told properly, it has to be told in your voice.”
“No,” I said. “That’s where you’re wrong. It doesn’t have to be told at all. Don’t come to my home, or to my place of work, again. I’m sure you know that I have a child. Her mother won’t talk to you. That I can tell you for sure. If you approach them, if you even pass them on the street and catch their eye, I’ll kill you and bury you in a shallow hole. You need to let this slide.”
Wallace’s face hardened, and I saw the man’s own inner strength reveal itself. Instantly, I felt tired. Wallace wasn’t going to fade into the night.
“Well, let me tell you something, Mr. Parker.” He mentioned the name of a famous actor, a man around whom rumors of a sexual nature had long circled without finding purchase. “Two years ago, I agreed to write an unauthorized biography of him. It’s not my area, all that Hollywood bullshit, but the publisher had heard of my talents, and the money was good, given the subject. He’s one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. His people threatened me with financial ruin, the loss of my reputation, even the loss of limbs, but that book is due to be published in six months’ time, and I can stand behind every word of it. He wouldn’t cooperate, but it didn’t matter. The book is still going to appear, and I’ve found people who’ve sworn that his whole life is a lie. You made a mistake punching me in the gut. It was the action of a frightened man. For that alone, I’m going to claw and dig in every dirty corner of your life. I’m going to find out things about you that you didn’t even know existed. And then I’m going to put them in my book, and you can buy a copy and read about them, and maybe then you’ll learn something about yourself, but I can tell you for sure that you’ll learn something about Mickey Wallace.
“And if you ever lay a hand on me again, I’ll see you in court, you fuck.”
With that, Wallace turned around and trudged back to his car.
And I thought: Aw, hell.