Leather Maiden

12

I had recently bought myself a police scanner for the car and had rented a little apartment not far from where Mom and Dad lived.

I was on the bottom floor of a duplex. Nothing cute, nothing fancy. Just cheap rent. I pushed against the moisture-swollen door and made my way inside. It smelled as if a rat had died in the walls; it had held that smell for the entire week I had lived there. In the morning it was at its weakest, but as the day wore on and it became hot, Mr. Dead Rat, or so I assumed it was, heated up in the walls and gave off an odor that could grab you by the collar and toss you out the door. I remembered a story I had read by Mark Twain about a cheese that had stunk so bad that he gave it military promotions. It was the same with my dead rat. He was a private in the morning, but by the afternoon I had promoted him to general. It was almost that strong now, but not quite. He was at about a captain’s level.

I put the DVD in the player and turned on my little TV and sat down in a comfortable chair with only a bit of the stuffing leaking out. At first I thought the DVD was blank, but suddenly it sputtered to life. And then my heart was in my mouth. There were two people in it. Nude. One of them, the woman, was immediately recognizable to me. It was Caroline Allison. On a bed. She looked like a movie star. A porn star. Her long brown legs moved sensuously over the man’s back, her heels rubbing his buttocks. The man’s face was turned away from me. He lifted up, supported himself above her on his hands so that he could thrust, and I could see the side of his face then, and that’s all I needed to see.

I stood up from my chair without meaning to. The dead rat smell filled my nostrils. I felt dizzy. My stomach clenched like a fist. I walked around my chair, glanced at the television, watched as the man gently shifted and guided the woman into another position.

I could see more than the side of his face now. A lot more than I wanted to see. And there was no mistake.

I felt as if I couldn’t swallow. As if I couldn’t breathe.

The man making love to Caroline Allison was my brother, Jimmy.

I started to turn off the DVD, but couldn’t. I walked around my chair and watched the TV with glances. When the DVD finished and went black, I stood there with my hands on the back of my chair, leaning forward, looking at the dark screen, as if waiting for some sort of revelation.

I went around and sat in my chair for a while. Finally I had enough strength to get up and turn off the set, eject the DVD. I robotically put the DVD back in its container, took it and slid it between two books in my bookcase, All the President’s Men and State of Denial. I went into the kitchen and got a bottled coffee out of the fridge and drank it. It could have been nectar of the gods or lye from under the sink, and I wouldn’t have noticed.

I took the FedEx package and put it in the trash. I took the note and read it again and put it between the two books with the DVD.

I got my cell phone out of my pocket and called Jimmy’s cell. He didn’t answer. He would most likely be in class, or having office hours. I took a deep breath and went downstairs and got in my car and drove around town, and finally out to the spot where the town almost ended, headed to where the old Siegel house sat and parked down the hill from it. The hill was specked with gangly pines and all around it the grass was the color of sandpaper, but in front of the house, and on the right and left sides, was a thick carpet of crawling kudzu that wound its way up in twists and twirls and eventually became a huge emerald wad at the top. The wad would be the Siegel house, consumed by vines, lying gray and silent in the belly of the green.

I drove around to the old clay road that led behind the houses. It was narrower than I remembered. Perhaps the grass had grown up closer on either side of the road. Maybe it was that old problem about being away for so long you remembered all things as bigger and wider and deeper and greater. Like lost love.

Driving up the road, I bumped into some big holes where it had washed out, tooled to the top of the hill and parked behind the vine-covered house on a gravel rise where the kudzu had been unable to make purchase. But at the back of the house were the vines. They grew along the outside walls of the house, covering some of the back door and all the windows except for a rare wink of glass.

I sat there for a long time and thought about Jimmy and Trixie. I had thought they had the perfect life. I wondered what in the world Jimmy had been thinking. Well, hell, I knew what he had been thinking. But why had he let it get the better of him? It was like me to let it get the better of me. I was the one who did stupid things, but not Jimmy. No wonder he was nervous the night I spoke to him about Caroline. No wonder he wanted to change the subject.

My God, I thought. He couldn’t have had anything to do with her missing. He just couldn’t have. Jimmy wasn’t like that. He didn’t have it in him. But where had the DVD come from? Why had it been sent to me? And by whom? And had Jimmy known he was being filmed?

A ton of questions fell down on top of me, but I didn’t receive so much as an ounce of answers.

I sat up there on the hill with my window rolled down and the hot air not stirring even a little bit. I started the engine and rolled up the window and turned the air conditioner on full blast and sat there for a while longer. Then I put the car in gear and coasted back down the hill and out to the road. I drove slowly by the old railway station below, as if I thought Caroline’s car might still be parked there and the law had overlooked the fact she had just gone out for a walk, was about to show up again, eat her fast-food dinner, put on her shoes and drive away.

I drifted back into town and got a parking pass at the campus police station, drove over to a lot behind the history department. I locked up and walked over to the building that housed the department, turned and looked at the clock tower. I could see the big, ragged gears through the face of the clock; they were silver now, not gold, because the light was different. The dark hands of the clock lay flat against the outside of the glass. I looked at my watch. I was either five minutes fast or the clock was five minutes slow.

Entering the building, I rode the elevator up to the third floor. When I got off the halls were silent except for a janitor pushing a squeaky trash cart. Summer classes aren’t as busy as spring or fall, so there’s not much excitement that time of the year. The janitor squeaked on by.

I had no idea if Jimmy was teaching or in his office. Maybe he had another coed locked in there and he was doing with her what he had done with Caroline. Maybe he was filming it?

There were a couple of hallways and there were offices on either side of the hallways, and I walked along looking at the name plaques beside the office doors, trying to find the one that belonged to Jimmy.

A man with a nose like a pink cucumber, a beard and about four strands of reluctant hair pasted down across the top of his head was sitting in an office with his door open. Behind him, through the window, I could see the university plaza, and beyond that, the parking garage.

I introduced myself and Cucumber Nose told me his name was Thomas Burke. I asked him about Jimmy, and he told me where to find him. I went there. It was an office two doors down from Burke’s place. The door was locked. There was a schedule on the wall by the door, but I was so nervous I couldn’t make heads or tails out of it. I might as well have been reading Sanskrit, the way my mind was working.

“Cason,” a voice called.

I turned. It was Jimmy. He had a stack of books under his arm and was walking toward me, smiling. When he saw the expression on my face, he quit smiling, said, “Mom and Dad okay?”

I nodded.

“Trixie?”

I nodded again. “Brother,” I said. “We have to talk.”

Jimmy unlocked his office door and went inside and put his stack of books on his desk, turned and looked at me.

“You look like your dog just committed suicide,” he said.

“Actually, I think my brother just fucked himself.”

He gave me a puzzled look. I couldn’t hold his gaze. I turned and looked out his window and took in a new vantage point on the plaza and the parking garage, the clock. I walked over to the window for a better view. It was an old-style window that cranked open. It was part of the original building, constructed back in the 1930s. Back when it was an all-women’s teacher’s college. I felt like I wanted to crank it open and get a taste of the warm fresh air. Anything to clear my head.

“The clock,” Jimmy said. “All that money for it, and it doesn’t keep good time…What exactly do you want to talk about?”

“There might be a better place to discuss it than here.”