Chapter Eighteen

As tom drove down quaker road on his way home from his new job at Kroeler’s Paint, he noticed Carl Whitford, the sheriff, and Rita Kruppman standing on the sidewalk in front of the library. Carl waved and Tom did the same but then realized he was being asked to pull over.

He thanked God he hadn’t been drinking.

Rita waved and ducked into the library, pointing at the books she carried. Tom pulled over and rolled down the passenger window. “Hey, Carl. What’s up?”

Carl tilted his hat back, took off his sunglasses and checked for smudges before putting them back on. Although Carl Whitford was still in pretty good shape—firm, if a bit tightly packed around the middle—his face was developing jowls. In a few years they’d be puffing up over his collar, giving him the look of a huge strangling chipmunk.

“I’ve been meaning to call,” said Carl. “How are you?”

“I’m all right. You?”

“Oh, good. I’m good.” Carl leaned into the window. “I thought maybe you’d drop by the station.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Well, sometimes people do if a family member goes missing.”

“I guess they do, sometimes.”

“Been what, a few weeks now. Technically, I should have had a talk with you before this.”

“But you didn’t want to intrude.”

“Not if I didn’t have to.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Still, I have to ask.”

“So ask.”

“Is Patty missing?”

“That depends on what you mean by missing.”

“Look, Tom. I know you’re going through one hell of a time. You know this town.”

“Yup, I do.”

“Well, I just want to make sure there’s nothing I need to know. You tell me you have reason to believe she’s all right, that’s good enough for me.”

Tom hung his head. He had known Carl his whole life. They’d gone to school together. Their fathers played poker together and now they played poker together, although Tom hadn’t been part of the game for a while. The truth probably was Carl knew everything there was to know, including who Patty was with right this minute.

Tom lifted his gaze to meet Carl’s. “Anybody else filed a missing person’s?”

“Can’t say as they have.”

“So, I guess that’s the kind of missing they are.”

“Interesting way of putting it.” Carl looked down the street and seemed to be considering what else to say. Then he looked back at Tom. “Kids all right?”

“We’re working things out.”

The sheriff knocked the door of the truck with his knuckle. “You should come out for a poker game some night. Not good to sit around, Tom.”

“Yup.”

“And, by the way, Rita said you should call her if you need anything.”

“She did, huh?”

Carl shrugged. “People care about you. That’s all I’m saying.”

The next day, by mid-afternoon, Tom’s arms ached. The muscles in his neck bunched and his shoulders cramped. He had thought tossing pallets of bread around took strength, but here, loading five-gallon buckets of paint into boxes and then hefting the boxes onto pallets waiting for the forklift to take them to the loading dock, he understood the insidious power of ceaseless, repetitive motion. It was hot on the assembly line. The machines clacked and rattled and pounded and even the earplugs didn’t help much. The plant and attached warehouse were cavernous and the aluminum and steel walls amplified and echoed the cacophony of forklifts and assembly belts and the endless thwack and whack of rubber mallets on paint lids. Tom had a headache halfway through each shift and was nauseous by quitting time.

Since he was new man in, the foreman moved him around the plant, using him where he was needed, sizing him up for some final destination. Loading the boxes was better than some of the other duties he was called upon to perform. The one he hated most was when they asked him to climb into the huge vats and scrape paint from the inside. If it was ninety degrees on the factory floor, it was a hundred and ten in the vats, and not even the industrial masks stopped the fumes from getting through. The stench permeated every corner and crevice of the place, and the inside of his nose felt singed. At night, at home in bed, he fancied the vapours had pickled his skin, tainted his clothes, his furniture, his bed sheets—making him dream of death by chemical burn, death by incineration, death by nerve gas. The old-timers said you got used to it; he remained unconvinced.

When he worked on the line, hammering lids onto the cans, he stood next to a guy named Hank Corkum who had been released from prison after serving three years for assault. Corkum’s joy was to put paint scrapers, gloves, rubber mallets and anything else he could get his hands on into the can before he sealed the lid. Tom saw him do it the first day they worked side by side and Corkum knew he’d been seen. That day at lunch break Corkum had followed Tom into the men’s room and stood with a mallet in his fist and stared at Tom until Tom shrugged his shoulders and said, “I need this job, friend. You won’t get trouble from me.” And Corkum grunted and turned and left Tom to his business.

Tom did need the job. As hard as the physical conditions and the monotony were and as much as he missed the early morning road, the solitude and the friendly banter with the customers, the pay at Koehler’s was better than he’d earned driving the bread truck and, most importantly, it was a regular shift—eight in the morning until four in the afternoon. He’d been lucky to find any job at all in these times, and with his lack of education. He wasn’t good for much, was he? That seemed to be the consensus. At least he was home when the kids came in. Ivy went to Dorothy’s some afternoons, and when Ivy was home, she seemed determined to replace her mother. Nervously tidying and sweeping, dusting and polishing. Tom would send her up to her room to do her homework, and when he went to check on her, he’d find her scrubbing the bathroom. It was as though by keeping order and cleanliness in the house, she could somehow banish their grief. Maybe she saw dust as a layer of grey, silt-like, torpor-inducing sorrow, endlessly floating down to infect them. Tom worried she would become obsessed with the house, with him, and forget she was just a little girl. But Bobby was another story. He wasn’t home much these days. Tom didn’t know what was up with his son, didn’t know whom he was with, or what he was doing, only that the boy had turned even more silent, sullen and contemptuous since Patty walked out.

Patty.

In his mind, he could say “walked out” now. That was something of an improvement, he supposed, but still, even thinking her name sent a knife through his gut. Over the weeks, shock and despair had turned to anger. With every bucket of paint he dropped into the box, he named another anger. Anger for their children. Anger at her selfishness. Anger at her cruelty. Anger at his blindness over all those years. Anger at himself for loving her still.

He caught his finger between two paint cans. The metal edge cut into his cuticle and blood pooled and then ran down to his knuckle. He cursed and wiped the blood off on his overalls.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and the shift was winding down. Eyes darted to the clock behind the metal cage high on the wall and work slowed. Lips could already taste beer. Fifty minutes to the bell. Aching muscles could already feel hot water. Forty minutes. Thirty. Aching feet could already feel shoeless freedom. Fifteen.

Greg Atkins, the foreman, tapped him on the shoulder. Sweat beaded on Atkins’s meaty face and his expression was one of embarrassment. Tom wondered, with a twinge of panic, if he were about to be laid off.

“Tom, there’s a guy waiting outside on the dock. Says he needs to talk to you.”

“Who is he?”

“He seems pretty upset.” Atkins’s thick fingers fiddled with his belt buckle and he avoided Tom’s eyes. “You maybe want to go talk to him.”

“Is it my kids?” Tom pushed the button on his line that would re-route the paint cans to another belt. “Something happen to them?”

“No, it’s not your kids, Tom.”

“What is it, then?”

“You best go see. Knock off for the day.” And with that Atkins walked away.

Tom grabbed his lunch pail and headed for the loading dock. As he neared, he saw five men standing in a cluster talking. Laughing. When one of them saw Tom, he pulled at his mouth, erasing a grin, and nudged the man nearest him. The second man glanced over his shoulder, saw Tom and stepped away. With that the group dispersed, although they didn’t go far. The sun was blinding, creating a huge blank eye of whiteness at the dock opening. Tom squinted into the brilliant day, seeing no one there, only a few trucks waiting for tomorrow’s loading, and a battered brown Chevy parked just outside the steel mesh gates. The inside of his stomach felt raw, as though it were being scraped with a wire brush. He gazed around, puzzled, and was just about to ask one of the men if somebody had been looking for him, when the door of the Chevy opened and a man got out. The man hesitated, put his hands in the pockets of his jeans, and stepped forward, haltingly, a little unsteady. He was a short man, although powerfully built and a little bow-legged. The T-shirt he wore flashed too brightly white. Tom was sure he didn’t know the man. He couldn’t make out his features since the sun was behind him. The man came forward, to about halfway across the lot, and stopped. He stood looking at Tom, weaving slightly.

“You looking for me?” Tom said.

“Can I talk to you?” the man said. He swiped his index finger under his nose.

“I know you?”

“No. Kinda. I mean, no.”

Tom’s body knew who it was first, the same way you suddenly knew, with a gut-clenching, spiralling certainty that it wasn’t a vein you’d cut, it was a spouting artery and all your blood was going to flow onto the kitchen tile before you even had a chance to dial 911.

His first thought was that something had happened to Patty and this man had come to bring news of her death. His stomach dropped and rolled and the sky and earth exchanged places. He reached for something to hang onto, caught the foam dock seal. How would he tell the children? Their faces swam before him. Patty’s face hung in the air.

The man took a couple of steps forward into a patch of shade and Tom saw him more clearly. A nose that told of bar fights, high cheekbones, milky brown eyes, a wide mouth, now loose with emotion. It was a face marked by hard living, but traces of the handsome man he must have been once were still apparent.

“I’m Larry. I didn’t have no one else who’d understand,” the man said. “I’m Larry Corkum.”

With an effort, Tom began to breathe. He squatted, and then jumped off the dock, felt a pain in his knee where his lunch pail knocked into bone. He came close to the man, smelled alcohol. Saw that his skin was bad, bumps where his beard had ingrown, a couple of sores it looked as though he’d been picking at. What had Patty seen in this man? “Tell me,” he said.

“I, I, I want to know . . . I want to know if you heard from her.”

“Heard from her? What do you mean? Is she all right?” Tom wanted to lay hands on this man, this Larry, but sensed if he came too close, the man would bolt.

“She left me, man, she left me in Albany,” he wailed, saying the word Albany as though the particular site of the abandonment increased the injury, the insult.

The news hit Tom in the centre of his chest. She’ll come home now, he thought. She’ll come home. Everything in him leaped, soared, and then, in nearly the same instant, crashed down, because maybe she wouldn’t, or maybe Larry was lying and had harmed her. Maybe she had never left him at all, but maybe she had been taken away. But look at this Larry—he was a mess, crying even now, snot bubbles and all. Not a murderer, just a loser, just a guy left in Albany. Tom’s thoughts were dust devils, whirlwinds sucking up dirt from below and shooting it up in a fierce scatter of possibilities. Larry was still speaking through the blubber of his tears.

“I can’t believe she left me, man. I thought she’d go home to you, maybe? Or maybe she’d changed her mind and then I thought, you know, I know it’s crazy but I had to talk to you. I had to say how sorry I was, tell you how I’d like to rip out my own eyes!” Larry put his hands, claw-like, up to his face.

“Hey, now,” said Tom. “Hey, now!”

Larry dropped his hands and held them out to Tom, as though about to embrace him. “I didn’t know, you get it, man? I didn’t know!”

Tom stepped back. Larry Corkum was high as a kite.

“But now I do know. I know what it feels like. I didn’t want that for you. I didn’t know she was a fucking witch! She put something on me, and I bet she did on you, too. Some fucking hoodoo shit. I can’t shake her, you know?” His voice trailed off.

“When did you see her last?”

“I don’t know. A week maybe. Took me a while to get back here. She took my wallet, took the fucking car.”

“She stole your car?”

“She stole my soul, man. Stole my soul.” He hung his head, tears dripping from the end of his nose.

Tom could not take this in. That she stole. That she took money, a car, left another man. Who the fuck was she, this woman he had lived with for so long? Disgust for the self-pitying, melodramatic wreck before him hit Tom with such force he stepped back. Then, the image of his own sorry state arose, of how he sat for days in front of the television, not bathing, drinking scotch, crying, ignoring his children. “Shit,” he said.

“She didn’t come here? She didn’t come back here?” Larry said, arms wrapped around his chest, shivering slightly.

“No.”

“Oh, Jesus, Jesus. What am I going to do?”

“I have no idea.”

“I’m out of money and all.”

Tom knew that if Larry asked him for money he would kill him. He would put his hands around his throat and squeeze until his eyes popped out of his head and lay on his bloated cheeks. His hands flexed. He realized he must have dropped his lunch pail at some point. His body was working on some primal level not connected to his brain. It might do anything. Anything at all.

“Larry! Larry! What the fuck are you doing, man?”

Tom turned as Hank Corkum hopped down from the loading dock, nimble as a cat, light on his feet and quick for a man his size.

“Hey, Hank,” said Larry. “I just needed, you know.”

“No, I don’t fucking know. I told you to stay the hell away from here. Why don’t you listen to nobody, man?” Hank kept his eyes on Larry, crossing the asphalt in a few long strides, his hands out to either side, palms up, in query or supplication.

And Tom thought: So again, everyone knew but me. It was very hard to keep his hands at his side, not to hit something, break or tear or crack something.

“I wanted to say I’m sorry. Like in that program, right, where you make amends and shit.”

“You have to be fucking sober for that, Larry. You hear me? Doesn’t mean shit if you’re high, you asshole. You took my fucking car? And you’re drinking?” Hank looked at Tom for the first time. “You want to pop my idiot cousin, I’m not going to interfere.”

Tom considered the offer. It would be easy. He didn’t know what it felt like to snap someone’s jaw under his fist, had never hit anyone that hard before, although he had no doubt he could do it with a single punch. Faced with the invitation to crush the man he held responsible for his present agony, he could not deny the allure of bloodshed. Larry Corkum stood before him, eyes ragged and roaming under the weight of his own pain, skin blotched and pocked with the effects of whatever drug he was taking, cheeks hollowed by a variety of hungers, hands quivering slightly, not even preparing to defend himself. His mouth was slack and open, his breath a funk of beer fumes. He swayed on unsteady legs.

“Yeah,” Larry said. “You go ahead. You hit me. I deserve it.”

“No, thanks,” said Tom.

Larry began to crumple in earnest then. His lower lip trembled and his eyes dripped large, oily tears.

“Come on, Larry. Get you out of here.” Hank stepped forward and pushed his cousin’s shoulder to move him toward the car. “I’m driving.”

“Wait, wait.” Larry looked at Tom and then, slowly, extended his hand. It hung there in the sticky air, shaking, the colour of ham. “I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry. I didn’t know. Just didn’t get it.”

Tom did not want to shake Larry’s hand. He wanted to turn and get as far away from this man, from this place, as was possible. He looked down at Larry’s hand, and saw it as an already-dead thing, simply unaware of its own mortality. “Let’s just leave it, okay?” he said.

Before he could stop him, Larry reached out and took his hand, grabbed it and pulled Tom into an awkward and surprisingly fierce embrace.

“You’re all right, you know that?” Larry blubbered into his neck. “She don’t deserve you.”

Tom was so stunned he just stood there, his eyes meeting Hank’s whose wide-eyed shock probably mirrored his own. Larry punched him lightly on the back with his fist all the while clutching his hand up against his chest.

“Shit,” said Hank.

“I love you, man. I’d fucking cut off my arm. My fucking arm,” Larry mumbled.

And without really knowing why, except perhaps it was the only way Tom could see to end this grotesque waltz, he reached up with his free hand and slapped Larry a couple of times on the back. “Pull yourself together, Larry. For fuck sake. Come on now. Come on.”

Hank tugged at Larry’s arm. “Quit acting crazy and get in the fucking car.”

Larry let Hank lead him away, muttering all the time he was sorry, really sorry.

Tom stood in the sharp, unforgiving light and felt as though a strip of his flesh had been pulled away. It was hard to breathe and for a moment he was rooted, still sensing the weight of the other man hanging in his arms. At last, he turned to go round the building and find his car in the employee parking lot.

In the mouth of the loading dock stood a small group of men. He knew their names. Ed, Bob, Clint, Austin, Wooly and Huck. Had known most of them his entire life, knew the names of their kids and where they lived and in at least three cases, to whom they’d lost their virginity. But he hadn’t known this about them: hadn’t known they could stand at that coward’s distance and watch a man’s humiliation and anguish and smile about it. Hadn’t known they could stand in the shade of a rubber and brick overhang and smile and snigger behind their thick, paint-spattered fingers. It did something to him; all that knowledge piled up inside him like stones. It filled him somehow, and protected him. His bent shoulders straightened. His head realigned from its bowed position to sit at ease and his eyes grew calm. Tom regarded these men with an unfaltering gaze and it seemed as though the distance, both temporal and spatial, was very great. It was a sort of detachment, an objectivity from which he imagined himself on a smouldering pyre, strapped to the post of his agony, waiting for the flames to begin, the smoke to rise, and while he accepted that soon he would be consumed by the loneliness all around him, just for this moment there was a kind of pride in his position. His naked pain glowed with a kind of grace.

One by one, in silence, the men stopped sniggering and without looking at one another, they turned and disappeared into the factory shadows, until Tom was left alone. The factory clanged and clattered and voices, some of them gruff with embarrassment, skidded and scattered along the heat ripples rising from the asphalt.

It was a long walk to his truck and Tom was less than halfway there before his cheeks were wet and he was half-blind. Inside the cab, the air was hot as a crematorium oven. He thought he might dissolve to nothing but a puddle of bubbling fat and charcoaled bone.