I’ve never bought into Nietzsche’s notion about what doesn’t kill you making you stronger. My experience has been what doesn’t kill you nearly kills you, beats the crap out of you, and leaves you bleeding by the side of the road.
Take the last few months, for instance. If Nietzsche had been right, I’d be making Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Pee-Wee Herman right about now. And it all started four long months ago.
Four months ago, when I killed a man.
Shot him stone cold, point-blank, more times than I can remember. It was a me-or-him situation and there were other people involved. If I hadn’t done what I did, the body count would’ve been even higher. As a result, I got dragged before the police, then the grand jury, and grilled like Elisha Cook Jr. sweating under a hot lamp. In the end, I was cut loose. Justifiable homicide. Self-defense.
It didn’t matter. I’d taken a life. There’s a point-of-no-return concept involved here. Unlike virtually every other act of human existence, killing is irrevocable. The weight of it sat on me like a bad winter.
All systems shut down. For months I barely left my tiny attic apartment above Mrs. Hawkins’s house in East Nashville. Phone calls went unreturned. When I bothered to go in to my office, the mail—most of it junk—was piled up on the floor like the makings of a good campfire. The days went by in a blur, an endless mire of sleep—sometimes sixteen or more hours a day—interspersed with moments of wakefulness that were so foggy and sleep-logged they seemed as if a dream.
I remember paperbacks, lots of paperbacks. Sometimes I’d wake up, still in my clothes, with piles of them scattered haphazardly across the rumpled bedsheets wadded up next to me. And jazz; the small clock radio by my bed stayed tuned to the all-jazz public radio station outside Nashville and played softly day and night, night and day.
During a rare venture into the outside world, I managed to impregnate the woman with whom I’d been involved for several years. She had her own problems; this was her way of dealing with them. For a while, it seemed as if the prospect of parenthood in my forties would put a spark back. But it didn’t.
Ultimately, I had to come out of it.
I thought I’d walk away from it, just chuck it all and start over. But that’s easier said when you’re twenty or even thirty than when you’re in a staring contest with forty-five and you sense that forty-five ain’t going to blink first.
In the end, it was the money—or lack of it—that drove me back to work. I’d borrowed a couple of grand from my parents, who are retired now in Hawaii, but I couldn’t face going back to that well again.
So I went back out in the world. It was just like starting over again, just like six years ago when I first hung out my shingle as a private investigator. The couple of clients who fed me regular work—fraudulent workers’ comp claims and the like—had moved on to other people when I disappeared. The few calls I’d gotten through my tiny ad in the yellow pages never called back when they couldn’t find me.
It didn’t take long to realize that the hole I’d dug myself into was deeper than I first thought. Bills were piling up fast. My office rent was a month behind. The phone was going to be cut off if I didn’t get a check off to BellSouth in the next few days. I sat in my office all morning that first Monday after my momentous decision, balancing the books, going through stacks of checkless mail piled next to a silent phone. As Mary Chapin Carpenter sang: “The stars might lie, but the numbers never do.” I took the coldest, hardest look I could, without any sense of panic or desperation, then took the only alternative left.
I called Lonnie.
I met Lonnie about a hundred years and another life ago, back when I was a newspaperman. This was when I was writing features for the newspaper, even before I got transferred to the state capitol beat. I was doing a piece for the Living section on people who’d come to Nashville to make it big in country music and then been forced to take other jobs when the record companies didn’t pile dump-truckloads of money on their front porches. Lonnie’d come to Music City from Brooklyn. I’d heard him sing; he should’ve stayed home. But you can’t tell these people anything. They all think they’re the next Wynonna or Shania or Clint or Garth or one of those other odd-sounding names.
After a couple of years scraping by on Lower Broad, tending bar part-time and playing open-mike nights, Lonnie decided there had to be something better. A buddy of his said he knew a guy who repossessed cars and would pay upwards of fifty bucks a pop for help. Guy could make a quick two hundred a night if he worked at it, paid in cash at the end of the shift. Lonnie jumped on it, repossessing about four hundred cars over the next six months before it occurred to him he could make even better dough doing it himself.
He bought an old junkyard off Gallatin Road on a tiny side street behind what used to be the Inglewood Theatre back in the Fifties but was now a salvage store. There was a rusted mobile home on the lot and it was surrounded by a ten-foot-high chain-link fence. Lonnie and his guard dog, a timber shepherd bitch whom he’d aptly named Shadow, moved in.
Over the years, Lonnie did real well, branching out into bounty hunting, industrial counterespionage and security, electronic surveillance, and a few other spook hustles when he got bored. He was mostly a loner and shut down in front of others. I knew him for years before I learned he’d once been married back in Brooklyn and that his wife had been murdered. I never knew him to date, at least not seriously, and there were very few people he was comfortable around.
When my career as a hotshot political reporter crashed and burned and I decided to try private investigating, I turned to him for some insights. Next thing I knew, I was padding across a dew-soaked backyard in East Tennessee in the middle of a crisp, moonless autumn night, stalking an elusive 1989 Ford Explorer, and hoping the guy who’d been hiding it from us didn’t have good hearing and a twelve-gauge by the bed.
Lonnie and I had seen each other through some interesting times in the last few years. We had developed that easygoing, smartassed way of dealing with each other that men adopt when they don’t know any other way to show affection. It had been nearly four months since I’d had any contact with him, the longest time that had passed since we became friends. I was looking forward to seeing him—something I took as further evidence that I was almost alive again—but felt almost guilty that after so much silence, I was tracking him down because I needed something from him.
I got over that real quick, though. There was a phone number, one that only a few close associates were given. It was among several lines running into the mobile home and the only one he always answered. If he was out, he even forwarded that number to his cell phone.
I dialed the number. The phone rang about twenty times without an answer.
I didn’t think much of it. The next best approach was to hoof it back across the bridge to East Nashville and track him down. I left my shabby office building, which was looking more and more run-down all the time compared to the new construction in downtown Nashville, and walked two blocks up Seventh, to where I’d found a parking space on the street. I used to have a contract space in a parking garage, but the developers tore it down two months ago, paved it over as a parking lot, then jacked up the rates so high, I couldn’t afford them anymore.
Progress.
It was late afternoon by the time I found myself weaving through the traffic on Gallatin Road toward Lonnie’s junkyard. I made the turn off the main drag, circled back around the Inglewood Theatre, and parked in front of the gate. The sky above was darkening and the wind had picked up, like one of those early spring thunderstorms guaranteed to pop up out of nowhere just as rush hour begins.
I pulled out my key ring and fumbled for the right key. Before unlocking the padlock, though, I rattled the chain-link gate for a few seconds. That was the drill if you didn’t want Shadow tearing your arm off. The past couple of years, her sight’s been going and she doesn’t hear as well as she used to. The hip dysplasia had gotten bad enough that she had trouble walking. But if she didn’t recognize you, she’d reach somewhere way deep inside herself and find the strength and agility for one more good lunge at your throat. And there was nothing wrong with her jaws.
I rattled the gate again, whistling this time. I pulled my coat tighter, the wind chilling me. From the north, darker clouds rolled in, heavy and threatening.
“Shadow!” I called. Nothing. I unlocked the gate and eased into the junkyard lot, then crossed a minefield of car parts, discarded tires, puddles of grease and grime, and gravel packed into mud. Perhaps twenty years of classic junkyard stretched in front of me before I reached the faded, pastel green trailer with the rust streaks down the side. I stepped up onto the cinder-block step and rapped on the metal door. The noise rang, tinny and hollow, reverberating through the trailer. I’d wondered at first if anyone was even there; now I began to wonder if the place had been cleared out.
I stepped down, over to a window left of the door, and peered in through a crack between the yellowed shade and the edge of the window.
The place had been trashed.
The couch was over on its back, the coffee table overturned next to it. The place had always been full of an odd mix of junk, car parts, exotic electronic devices, radios, computers, and stuff I didn’t understand, some of which would blow you to hell if you touched it the wrong way. Everything was scattered piecemeal on the floor, as if the gear had been thrown about in a rage. Dirty beer bottles littered the floor, with loose pages from books and manuals ripped from their bindings and strewn about.
I jumped back over to the door and pounded hard this time.
“Lonnie!” I yelled. “Hey, man, you in there?”
From my right, from somewhere inside the far end of the trailer, a board creaked.
“Lonnie,” I said, my voice not quite as loud this time. I put my hand on the door. Another creak, this one closer. Then another, each one coming nearer the door. I felt the vibrations as the footsteps approached.
“Yeah,” a muffled voice inside said. It sounded like Lonnie, but somewhat different.
“Lonnie, you okay?”
The knob turned and rattled as he unlocked the door. I backed away as he opened it, shocked.
Lonnie stood in the doorway, staring down at me. He’d lost maybe fifteen pounds and had neither shaved nor bathed in days. He wore oil-slicked faded jeans and a grimy T-shirt. There were great dark circles under his eyes and the hollows of his cheeks had deepened, the shadow of his beard accentuating the sharp curve of bone beneath skin.
He stared at me blankly for a few moments.
“You okay, man?” I asked. “You look like hell.”
He turned and walked back inside. “C’mon in,” he said.
I followed him in, my mind jumping from one flash of fantasy to another: he’d been jumped and beaten up by robbers—there had been, after all, a huge run on home invasions lately. Maybe one of his screwy experiments had gone wrong and he’d nearly blown the place up. Perhaps he’d just gone psychotic on me.
Suddenly, he whipped around just as I closed the door, his eyes dark and searing as he pointed a dirty finger at me.
“Okay,” he barked. “You’re a cartoon character!”
“I’m a what?” My voice cracked, a dry squeak that sounded embarrassingly wimpy.
“A cartoon character!” he snapped. “Now listen up, if you’re—”
“Which?” I interrupted.
“Which what?”
“Which cartoon character?”
“Damn it, Harry, how the hell am I supposed to know which cartoon character? Any goddamn cartoon character you want to be.”
He ran his hands through his hair and squeezed the sides of his head, as if attempting to relieve some horrible internal pressure. He paced back and forth in front of me, his eyes fixed on the floor.
“So you’re a cartoon character—”
“Popeye,” I said.
“What?”
“Popeye. I want to be Popeye.” And I’m thinking to myself that of all my imagined options of what had happened to Lonnie, psychosis was emerging to the forefront.
He threw his head back, furious at me. “All right, damn it, you’re Popeye the goddamn sailor man! Now shut up and listen!”
I nodded, afraid to say anything.
He put his hands on his hips and glared at me for a moment, daring me to speak.
“You’re a cartoon character,” he continued. “Now—and this is very important—who would you rather do, Betty Boop or Aunt Fritzi?”
My mouth hung open slightly. “What?” I whispered after a moment.
“Harry, this is important! This is very revealing.”
I stood there a moment pondering, and part of me was thinking that I can’t believe I’m standing here seriously trying to come up with an intelligent answer to that question.
Then, of course, I remembered I was supposed to be Popeye.
“What about Olive Oyl?” I asked.
Lonnie exploded, throwing his hands in the air, whirling around and karate-kicking the overturned sofa.
“Olive Oyl!” he roared. “Olive Oyl! That codependent, whiny, anorexic bitch! One minute she’s flirting with Bluto, the next she’s screaming for Popeye to come save her bony ass one … more … time!”
He stomped the floor, planted his hands on his hips again. I took a step backward, toward the trailer door.
“Jesus, Harry, I don’t see how you can even bring Olive Oyl into the equation here.…”
I thought for a moment. “Okay,” I said. “Okay. Lemme see. Aunt Fritzi’s looking pretty good these days. You know, she’s got that new guy drawing her. But she’s still got that awful Nancy living with her.”
“Oh, yeah,” Lonnie sputtered. “Yeah, I hate that little fat pig Nancy. I’d like to see Sluggo really lay into her, you know what I mean?”
I didn’t know what he meant but suspected now was not the time to ask. My eyes flitted from side to side as I tried to figure out what to say next.
“Jeez, Lonnie I guess I don’t know … I guess Betty Boop’d be a lot of fun.”
Lonnie let loose with a deep sigh of relief as his tightly wound body seemed to unravel and spread a bit. He leaned against the overturned couch and let it take part of his weight.
“Thanks, Harry,” he whispered. “I knew I could count on you.”
I stepped closer to him, but very carefully, uncertain what would make him explode next.
“Why the sudden interest in cartoon characters?”
He looked up at me, exhaustion in his eyes. “It’s very revealing,” he repeated. “Passion or responsibility, a life fully lived or a slave to convention. Betty Boop or Aunt Fritzi. When’s the last time you saw Aunt Fritzi have a date?”
“I see your point,” I lied.
His shoulders sagged and his chin drooped toward his chest. From the inside corner of one eye, a single tear ran down to the end of his nose.
“What is it, Lonnie?” I said, my voice as soft and soothing as I could make it. “What’s wrong?”
He raised his head and I saw a pain in his face that I’d never seen before. He looked completely and horribly alone, and suddenly I knew what had happened even before he spoke.
“Shadow died,” he said.