Leather Maiden

3

When I came out of Timpson’s office one of the reporters at one of the few occupied desks, a twentyish black guy in a bright yellow shirt with the sleeves rolled up, waved me over. It was like the president summoning a lackey, but I started over there anyway, went to his desk as he stood up and pushed his chair aside. He was short and broad-shouldered, with his hair cropped close, a crisp part cut into it. I stuck out my hand and we shook. He had one of those determined handshakes, not so brisk, but really strong, like it was more of a contest than a greeting.

“Cason Statler,” I said.

“I know who you are. I’m Oswald, like the guy that shot Kennedy.”

“Glad to meet you, Oswald.”

“How did it go in there?” he asked.

“I’m part of the team.”

“Oh, there are no team players here. We’re all pretty much out for ourselves. Trust me on that. Bend over and you’ll feel an intrusion. Look, I know Timpson seems old and grumpy and pretty much out of date, but I want you to know, she doesn’t just seem that way—she is that way.”

“We had a particularly pithy exchange about the colored.”

He grinned at me, and this time it seemed genuine. “Welcome to nineteen fifty-nine.”

“Actually, I’m from here, and I’d put this place more about late nineteen seventy. So don’t go putting it down.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Oswald said. “I didn’t move here until last year.”

“Why?”

“I’m asking myself that every day. But people are always telling me how it was wonderful in the old days. Probably not so wonderful for black folk, though.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Wouldn’t you love to come home to a shack out back of a white man’s plantation and sing some Negro spirituals after a hard day of picking cotton? Kind of kick back to let your whip lashes cool?”

That actually got a snicker out of him. “The only thing I’ve ever picked is my nose. I heard you were in the military.”

“That’s been a little while back. I had an accident and they had to let me leave.”

“You look fine now.” He said that like I had never been hurt.

“Accident was bad then, but I healed quicker than they expected. I haven’t made a big point of telling the military that.”

“I heard you got some medals,” he said.

“They were passing them out that day,” I said. “See you, Oswald.”

I saw Belinda putting down the phone, and as I walked away from Oswald’s desk, she rose from hers and intercepted me.

“That was Mrs. Timpson. She said I should show you your desk.”

She led me over to it and I was chauvinistic enough to watch her walk and decide she really was more than cute. She was a major looker, a little out of style in the hair and makeup department, but she dressed all right and I liked the way her skirt fit; it was tight enough and right enough to make the world seem like a happy place for at least a few moments.

“This is it,” she said.

It looked like everyone else’s desk. There was a computer on it and there was a drawer in the center and drawers on the sides. I opened them. The ones on the sides were empty. The one in the center had pencils and pens and paper clips and half a pack of Winterfresh gum. I took a stick, peeled it and put it in my mouth. It was like trying to chew a Band-Aid.

Belinda showed me her braces. “Good, huh?”

I took the gum out of my mouth, wadded it up inside the wrapper, dropped it in the trash can. “Not so much.”

“It’s been in there since the creation of gum.”

“I believe that.”

“So, how did you like our fearless editor?” Belinda asked.

“Very colorful.”

Belinda smiled her mouthful of braces at me. “That’s not what the others here call her.”

“No?”

“No.” She looked over her shoulder at Oswald, who had returned to his seat behind his desk. “What about the assassin of John F. Kennedy?”

“I can’t decide if he’s just testy or an asshole.”

She smiled. “Actually, Cason, he’s a testy asshole.”

I went around and met some of the reporters, folks in the advertising office, and was told a lot of them were out on assignments and I would meet them later. I made a few promises of lunch, went over to my desk and sat for a while and moved a pencil around.

It wasn’t as good as the desk I had in Houston. It wasn’t as good a newspaper. The pencil was even cheap. But here I was. I had screwed things up so I could arrive at just this spot. I was deep into having myself a pity party when Oswald, the testy asshole, came over. I had hoped me and him were through for the day. But no such luck.

“Timpson just called me,” he said. “She wants me to help you get your feet wet.”

“Go ahead, dampen me.”

“Well, Francine, the previous columnist, had a bunch of ideas she was working on, and Timpson thought you might want to look over those, see if you could get a running start before you had to come up with your own. You’re not obligated to use any of them, but she told me to tell you to take a look…You know, I thought I was going to get this job.”

“I was beginning to suspect that,” I said.

“But no, she wanted a certain cachet. She thought it would be nice PR having someone who had been nominated for the Pulitzer.”

“If it’s any consolation, a nomination eats your heart out.”

“No. No consolation. I’m used to getting screwed.”

“I hope you don’t think this is some kind of racial thing, because if you do, I just want you to know, sincerely, and I say this pleasantly and from the bottom of my heart, you are full of shit.”

Oswald sat on the edge of my desk. “I don’t. I’m just one of those people born to be screwed and to be bitter about it, but with a slight and engaging sense of humor, of course.”

“You really believe that?”

Oswald nodded. “I believe some of us are born with a target on our butt, and dead center of it is a slot with a sign above it that says: Insert dick here.”

“Do you look both ways when you cross the street?”

“I see this coming,” Oswald said.

“That’s what you can say if you look both ways…Do you?”

“Of course.”

“Then you believe your destiny is at least partly up to you, otherwise you wouldn’t be worried about being a hood ornament. It would be pre-ordained. So I suggest you remove the target from your ass.” Oswald gave me an irritated look. I said, “Let’s change the subject. What happened to Francine?”

“She was either fired, or she died. I don’t quite remember. Does it matter?”

“Suppose not. Where do I find those ideas of Francine’s?”

Oswald patted my computer. “In yon machine. Francine’s codes and information are on a pad in the desk drawer. So now my duty is done, and I go back to work.”

The testy asshole went back to his desk. For all his talk, I had a feeling Oswald really felt more entitled than ambitious. I figured, you got right down to it, his greatest ambition was teaching his dog to lick peanut butter off his balls.

I looked in the drawer and found the little notebook with the information I needed, went to work. Most of the stuff I found in Francine’s computer notes was about as exciting as counting the hairs in an armpit. There were terse investigations into the ingredients for Snickers Bar Pie, the major ingredients being the Snickers themselves and lots of butter. I was surprised the recipe didn’t come with a funeral plan. There were bits on flower arranging and how to get stains out of damn near anything. Nothing that really grabbed me by the lapels, but I persevered.

And then I came across it. A six-month-old mystery.

Caroline Allison. A university student. History major. Age twenty-three. She disappeared on a late-night run to a fast-food place, Taco Bell. A week later her car was found just outside of town, near the old rail station, not far downhill from the Siegel home. It was a creepy place to disappear.

The Siegel home had been a kind of legend for years. It had belonged to two sisters. Story was they had been high-tone in the 1920s. They were in their teens at the time. Then came the Great Depression, and their family lost money when the stock market fell. As the sisters grew into their fifties, their parents died, and the ladies knew nothing about how to survive. Soon people saw them digging in trash cans, and since they wouldn’t take charity, folks put food in the cans for them to find. Finally, the ladies sold their home place and moved into another house where they lived upstairs. That place caught on fire and the firemen put a ladder up to the window, but the women, in their sixties now, were in their nightgowns and wouldn’t come out the window dressed that way. It was not what ladies did. What ladies did was burn up like cotton wicks; death by fire and modesty.

The house the sisters had originally lived in had been bought, but nothing was done with it. It stayed abandoned, sitting on top of a hill spotted with trees, the yard a wad of greenery maybe three feet deep. The house was almost consumed by the vines until the whole thing looked like a large clump of vegetation with a couple of rectangular glass eyes.

Jimmy and I had played there as kids and gone parking up there behind the house with girls many years ago.

Had Caroline been there, near the old house, with someone? Had things gotten out of hand?

Had someone driven her car there, left it, gone away on foot? Did the person have an accomplice?

I scrolled down Francine’s notes. Caroline’s fast-food order had been found in the car, untouched. So had her shoes. The old train station had been searched, along with the house. The vines had been mowed down to see if her body was under them. Nothing.

I scrolled down some more.

There was information on Caroline, on her past. She had been raised as a foster child. She was as bright as a blast of nuclear light, according to the information Francine had gathered. In fact, Francine had a lot of meticulous notes. Perhaps even she had bored of Snickers pie and flowers in a vase, thought she was on to something.

No one could think of a single reason why anyone would want to hurt Caroline. Her only brush with the law was an overdue library fine that she refused to pay for some reason. The book was by Jerzy Fitzgerald, called And the Light Is Bright Glancing Off the Fangs of the Bear.

Francine had found one girl who knew her pretty well, Ronnie Fisher. Ronnie said she had known Caroline back in their hometown, that they shared a foster parent and had moved to Camp Rapture about the same time.

I leaned back in my chair and thought, what if I did a series of articles for the paper about her disappearance? About the illusion of safety in a small town? Then I could write a more ambitious article based on my columns, but with material I had left out of the local newspaper. I could get some interviews with the people who knew her, maybe a few shots of the car and that Taco Bell sack from the files, a photo of the young lady, then send the piece to some place like Texas Monthly. I had a few contacts there. The Pulitzer nomination still had some clout. Like a guy who had played in the Super Bowl and missed a pass, but had still played. I could probably slide the article right in.

If I set it up right, made sure the right people saw it, it might be just the sort of thing that would boost me into the big time. I had it all together once, until I started letting the little head think for the big head. Why couldn’t I pull it together again?

When I went out the bees were still at work and the flowers still smelled strong, and they still made my stomach churn. But now I had a job and I was pretty sure my shoes were still clear of dog shit and that the Caroline Allison story could be big, so life wasn’t sucking quite so much.

I thought about Caroline Allison for a while, then got out my cell, called Mom and Dad, told them I got the job, which they seemed dutifully excited about. I wanted to call someone else, but didn’t really know anyone. My brother and his wife, maybe. But Jimmy was at work, and I hadn’t seen them in a while, and I was working up to the moment.

Then there was Booger. I don’t know why I thought of him. I was trying to get rid of him, lose all the old connections from the war. But I knew he’d like to hear how I had turned out, even if he did think it was kind of a weird job for a grown man, writing for a newspaper. Booger thought man had been put on earth to find out if he was ruler or slave, and to eat meat, especially anything chicken-fried. He liked women too, but they came third in his business plan, and then there was nothing romantic about it to him. It was all just a service.

It was Gabby I really wanted to call. And not about the job, either. I just wanted to hear her voice. I drove by the veterinarian office. Her car was there. The same one she had owned when I left for Afghanistan. There were two other cars and a pickup. A big black mixed-breed dog was in a cage in the back of the truck, and a lady who looked as if she might wrestle alligators for a living was letting the dog out, placing a leash around its neck.

As I drove on, I looked back in the side mirror. The door to the office opened and the alligator wrestler and the dog started through it. I thought I got a glimpse of Gabby, but the truth of the matter is, it was so quick, and I was out of sight so soon, I couldn’t be sure. It could have been a dancing bear or a nude man carrying a slide trombone. It could have been anyone.