Reed Coleman - Empty ever after

“Responsibility and guilt are not the same things, Mr. Moe,” Israel Roth used to say. “We all do wrong things for all kinds of reasons, mostly they’re not worth losing sleep over. Besides, what does guilt change? A real man, a mensch, he knows when to feel guilt. When you’ve done what I had to do to survive, you know guilt. I can see in your eyes, Moses, that you too know guilt. For this you have my pity and my respect.”

Because guilt and I were usually estranged, because it was not my first instinct, I knew when I felt it, that it was right. I felt it now and it was right. It was to laugh, no? One lie, a lie that wasn’t even mine to begin with, still impacted lives in ways I could never have anticipated. I thought of Katy lying in the blood and broken glass. I thought of her lying so still in bed and imagined Joey Hogan’s face as I tried explaining myself to him. I backed out of his driveway and drove away as quickly as I could.

Located several miles outside Janus in sort of a municipal no man’s land, Henry’s Hog was on the wrongest side of the tracks. When my tires crossed the pair of tracks on Industry Avenue, I could swear that the sun’s light became more diffuse and the air got thicker and smelled of burning oil. The dust and decay, however, were not products of my imagination. Industry Avenue, once a meaningful designation, had long since given way to irony. Even before my first and only visit here, the area factories had already been abandoned. Now the only industry around here was of the cottage variety: meth labs and warehouse marijuana farms.

Henry’s Hog, an old wood frame house that had been converted into a bar, hadn’t much changed. The joint was as welcoming as a stuffed toilet and its windows were as yellow as a smoker’s fingers. The desolate paint factory and auto body shop that had once bookended the place were now masquerading as empty lots. There weren’t any bikes parked outside, but I tried the doors anyway. Pessimistic about success, I nearly fell inside when the door swung open.

Age hadn’t much improved the interior of Henry’s Hog either. The aroma was a vintage blend of black lung and beer piss. I wondered if the lazy fly that buzzed me as I stepped in wore a nicotine patch. A broad-shouldered woman in a Harley tee and black leather vest leaned over the bar, reading the New York Post. Her body jiggled as if she were laughing, but I can’t say she made any sounds that I recognized as laughter. And because she had her head down, I couldn’t see much of anything but the top of her short gray hair.

“Excuse me, I’m looking for Tina Martell.”

When she raised up to face me, I knew I had found who I was looking for, but not all of her. Tina Martell had once been the girl most likely to fuck you because she felt like it. She liked sex and didn’t dose it out like saffron or gold dust the way the other girls in town had. That hadn’t won her a lot of close girlfriends back in high school, but it made her pretty popular with the boys. When I met her, she was thick-bodied and big-breasted, but she had a cute face with a friendly mouth. She was tattooed and pierced a good two decades before every suburban kid came with a nose ring and ink as standard equipment.

Now part of her neck and throat were missing and ugly scars obscured her tattoos. A flap of white material covered the front of her throat above her collar bone. She sort of resembled a Salvador Dali painting, the entire left side of her face drooping down toward the scarring. Although her shoulders were still broad, Tina’s breasts were much smaller. Seeing her this way, I understood Vandervoort’s sad smile and his confusion over Patrick and Tina. She raised a clenched right hand to her throat.

“Who is… looking?” she asked in a robot voice, pressing her other hand to the white flap of cloth.

“Throat cancer?”

“Breast cancer… too,” she said, with an unexpected smile. “I’m thinking of getting… skin cancer and going… for… the trifecta. Wait, you look… familiar.”

I explained that we had met once, many years before. She remembered.

“You bought mea…beer.”

“That’s right. You told me to go fuck myself.”

She liked that, giving herself the thumbs up.

I explained about what I was doing there. The last time we’d spoken, Tina Martell hadn’t been particularly sympathetic to Patrick’s plight or mine. Not that I blamed her. Patrick had gotten her pregnant and asked her to marry him just as he had later done with Nancy Lustig. For all I knew, there were other women with whom Patrick had danced that dance.

She shook her head a little bit, eyes looking into the past. “I don’t know what to… tell you. I never wished no harm to… come to him. Wished harm on some, but not… him. Lotta tragedy in that family

… lotta tragedy. Too bad about Frank Jr., he was… hot.”

“So you don’t know anything about the desecration of the graves or about-”

“I got my own… problems, mister. Don’t need to cause none for… others.”

“You know anyone else who might have it in for the Maloneys?”

“The old man… maybe. Someone might’ve had it in… for him. He was a bona fide… cocksucker.”

“Amen to that.”

“But I can’t think of no one who’d want to hurt… the daughter. Hey, you wanta…beer?”

“It’s kinda early.”

“Early’s a matter of… interpretation.”

“Sure. Fuck it!”

She put a Bud up on the bar and went back to her paper. I tried searching for some follow-up questions, but came up empty. When the bottle was likewise empty, I said my goodbyes and headed for the door. Before I got halfway there, a familiar figure came strolling on in. It was Deep Voice, the biker who’d been in the ER. The doctors had patched up his head, bandaged the nasty road burns and scrapes on his arms, washed the blood off his face and beard, but he was still wearing the shreds of the clothing he’d worn last night. He stared at me without recognition. I realized I still had trace amounts of cop vibe and that didn’t work for him.

I put my hands up in submission. “Haven’t been a cop for a long time,” I said. “Besides, I’m kinda hurt you don’t recognize me.”

The light went on behind his eyes. “Last night in the hospital. You were all up in the sheriff’s face. What was that about?”

I should have told him it was none of his business and walked out, but I didn’t. For reasons I was only vaguely conscious of, I wanted to talk to this guy. I wasn’t at all sure why. I suppose I figured the why would come to me eventually.

“Let me buy you a beer.” He was thinking about it when I made the decision for him. “Tina, two Buds over here, please.”

We sat down at a nearby table and waited for Tina.

“How you know Tina?” he asked in that low rumble of a voice.

“We’re old acquaintances is all. So,” I asked, “how are you feeling?”

“Sore as shit, but they sewed me together okay. I’ll live. It’s not the first time I’ve had to lay a bike down.”

“I don’t doubt it. You got a name?”

“Crank.”

Great, I was buying beer for a meth cooker, but I didn’t react other than to reach my hand across the table to him. “Moe.”

Tina brought the beers over and I paid her. “Hey, Crank.”

“Hey yourself, Tina.”

She walked away shaking her head at the odd pair of us.

“So what about last night?”

“My ex-wife tried to kill herself.” He stopped mid-sip, eyes wide. “That’s why I was so agitated. It’s a long story.”

“Always is. Your old lady okay now?”

“She’ll live, but she isn’t okay.”

“Here’s to her,” he said.

We clinked bottles. A question was wiggling around in the back of my head. I thought it might be about something Crank had said last night. I tried recalling what he had said to Vandervoort about his accident. Just as words started to come out of my mouth, my cell phone vibrated. The question vanished.