Disappearing Acts

Meat tried to wipe the horror from his face and replace it with a look of innocence. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His voice went up higher than he wanted it to. “I don’t know anything.”

“Well, yes, I found the body. But that doesn’t mean I know anything. You can find a body and be completely ignorant.”

“I heard you coming. You were whistling,” she said in a dreamlike way that for some reason made him think of somebody weird, like out of Shakespeare. Anyway, he didn’t like it. “And I dragged Bennie into the stall, turned off the light, and hoped you wouldn’t find him.” She smiled. “But of course you did.”

“Well, I couldn’t help it. He fell out. I was minding my own business and he fell out. Where were you?”

“Yes. I was holding my breath, praying you wouldn’t open the door.”

“I couldn’t be sure. Finally you ran out, and I followed a little way down the hall and heard you telling everybody about what you’d found. Then that guy who owns the club came back.”

“Yes, good old Mike.” Her smile turned cruel as she said the name. “I barely had time to get out the door. I watched through the window as good old Mike dragged the body out and put it in the janitor’s closet.”

Meat glanced sideways for an escape and saw a blank wall. Other side, blank wall.

“Maybe he was going to get rid of Bennie’s body later,” she said. “He couldn’t risk Bennie’s body being found in Funny Bonz any more than I could.”

“Bennie told me Mike owes big money to the wrong people, and if the club doesn’t make it, he won’t either.”

“Because if Bennie’s body was found in Funny Bonz, then the murder could be connected to me.”

“How?” Meat checked again. Yes, the blank walls were still there.

“If Bennie’s body was found in the club, then the police might start asking questions about why he was there and then they would ask about his routine. Did you ever hear Bennie’s routine?”

“No, no, I didn’t know he had one. I just saw him that one time—and I thought he was a dead girl—the purse and the ponytail and all.”

“He had a routine all right.” She smiled. She was a girl of a hundred smiles, and Meat didn’t like any of them. “And it was all about me.”

“His fat girlfriend. That was his routine—being in love with a fat girlfriend, having to kiss a fat girlfriend. ‘My girlfriend has so many rolls of fat you can’t tell the boobs from the tubes.’”

“Yes, he was cruel. ‘You know how bra cups come in sizes A, B, and C? Her size is WOW.’”

Meat knew that would hurt because he had seen one of those WOWs himself.

“And he was getting ready to start going all over the country with his routine. He claimed he’d get on the Tonight Show and David Letterman. And there wasn’t any doubt who he was talking about—he even used my name. Mullet the Gullet. ‘Restaurants have signs that say, Maximum Occupancy: 240 or Mullet the Gullet.’”

She looked at him. “You don’t know how it hurts to be laughed at.”

She looked. “You’re not fat.” “I am.” He held his arms slightly out at his sides so she could get the whole miserable picture. And all of a sudden he was back at the newsstand, the book of fat jokes in his hand.

“Listen, I’m so big I have my own area code. When I put on my blue suit and stand on a corner, people try to drop mail in my mouth.”

“Well, when I put on my yellow raincoat, people yell, ‘Taxi!’”

“When I step on the scale, it goes, ‘We don’t do livestock.’”

“When I step on the scale, it goes, ‘One at a time, please.’”

“When I was floating in the ocean, Spain claimed me for the New World.”

“When I was lying on the beach, Greenpeace tried to push me back in the water.”

They paused, both out of breath. Her eyes narrowed. “Are you making fun of me, too?”

“No, no, of myself. That was research I did for my routine at the club.”

“I’m not?” A shiver of pleasure shot through his fear. “Do you mean that?”

The smile froze on his face as he saw the intent look on hers. She began to relive that terrible night.

“He had said we would talk at the club, but he pushed right on past me when I got there. He didn’t even speak. I followed him inside. He went into the men’s room. I even followed him in there.”

“He stood by the basin. He was looking in the mirror. I was behind him. I said, ‘I’m really unhappy, Benny. I’m beginning to think you don’t care about me anymore.’

“And the way he said that word made me realize he never had cared. It made me realize that the only reason he went out with me in the first place was for material.”

She was moving carefully, as if she were trying to hold his attention with her eyes. Snakes did stuff like this before they struck. He glanced down and saw what was in her hand—the knife she had used to open the locked door of Funny Bonz.

He took a step backward, another. He remembered the small shiver of pleasure her compliment had given him and he tried the same thing. “Anyway, I don’t think you’re fat either,” he lied.

“Oh, yes, I’m fat. I’m so fat that when I tripped on Fourth Avenue, I landed on Twelfth.” Another smile. He hated it when she did that. “And when I play hopscotch, I go, ‘New York, L.A., Chicago.’”

The way she said Chicago chilled his blood, because it was the sound of a conductor calling the absolute last stop in the world.

He tried desperately to think of one last joke to distract her. The Bermuda Triangle, what was it, exactly? Kids run around me and what? Are lost forever?

Whatever it was, Meat was never to say it. His throat had closed as if by a hangman’s noose. His mouth was dry. The blood pounded in his head so hard, he couldn’t hear.

And then with a smile, a strange smile that showed she was both victim and killer, she raised the knife. Then she became all killer, and the smile on her face, the last thing he knew he would see in this world, was the smile of a crocodile.