R.Scott Bakker - Disciple of the dog

Codes of professional conduct. Fawk.

I felt my eyes glazing. “Woo,” I said, expelling a lungful of specious air. “I. Am. Bagged.”

“What time you think you’ll be up for breakfast?” she asked. Knocks on my motel room door always unnerve me. The great thing about motel versus hotel rooms is the way they open up onto the world-like home. But this also means they’re exposed-like home. Hotels give you a controlled environment within a controlled environment. The really good ones make you feel like you’re in a Faberge egg or something. The world is reduced to soundless motion behind tinted glass.

Just one more gorilla exhibit.

I thought about grabbing my gun from my overnight bag, but decided against it. I knew who it was.

“Hi, Molly,” I said, pulling open the door. The light across the motel frontage was haphazard at best, so that my room light provided her only illumination. Her face stared up at me, bright and warm. My shadow fell across her body. Then I noticed…

There were tears in her eyes.

Fawk.

“Look,” she said hesitantly. “I know… I know how this works…”

“How what works?” The lack of interest in my voice shocked me.

She swallowed and blinked. She wiped the tear that fell from her left eye so fast that it almost seemed like a magic trick. Sean O’May, my old hand-to-hand trainer, among other things, would have been impressed.

“I mean, I know… know what you were… expecting, and um…” Her eyes were bouncing all over the place, but I could tell they had glimpsed my bed.

“What’s wrong, Molly?”

She tilted her head to the weight of her hair, flashed the kind of embarrassed smile that had duped me into thinking I was in love more than once.

“The funny thing is that I probably would have, you know? I mean, you’re…” She swallowed once again. “… handsome enough. And it’s been… well… a long time, you know? And I-”

“Molly,” I said on the edge of forceful and gentle. Kind of like the way I am in the sack.

“So now,” she continued babbling, “now I’m like… like-”

“Molly.”

“What?”

“Would you like to, ah, accompany me tomorrow?”

Any deal you strike with the media is going to be Faustian through and through-something I learned during the war. Good in the short term, disastrous in the long run. You see, if you’re successful, you get the whole circus except the ringmaster, hundreds of very clever and generally unscrupulous (because let’s face it, nothing justifies fucking people over quite so conveniently as the truth) journalists all feverishly working their own manic angles. It’ll tear you apart, even if you don’t give a rat’s ass about things like honour and reputation or have a career that’s remotely political. Media attention incites mobs, and mobs have the bad habit of looking for goats.

And the sad fact is, just about anyone will do.

Molly made a show of scrutinizing me-as if any con man worth fearing had ever been sussed out in a single glance. Finally she gave me one of those phony shrugs and said, “Sure,” in a little sister’s voice.

I began closing the door, leaning forward so that my face remained squarely in the gap. “I’ll meet you for breakfast at ten…”

I never was a morning person. That night I dreamed. Generally I smoke too much dope to dream: though the Lord’s Leaf is in no way neurotoxic, it does change the way blood flows through your bean, and this, apparently, affects a chronic user’s sleep patterns. A welcome side effect, in my case.

What made this dream positively kooky was that I woke up convinced I was as awake and as alert as a goaltender in overtime. I bolted from my pillow and there he was, watching me through a haze of cigarette smoke, my old war buddy, my mentor in all things violent: Sean O’May.

I’ll save his story for another therapy session.

He sat in the chair next to my room’s small table, slumped back, with his snakeskin boots kicked out, one to either side of a black hockey bag. His hair was dyed orange and slicked back like the old days. His eyes were sharp as always, so small they glittered perpetual black. His trademark cigarette hung from his trademark Mickey Rourke grin. For as long as I knew him, he was loath to reveal his teeth-probably because they were so freakishly small, like baby teeth.

“Soooo…” he drawled. “What are you saying, there, Disciple?”

I sat blinking at the sheer impossibility of him.

“You’re dead,” I finally managed to cough.

He snorted through his nose, sucked his cigarette bright. “Yah,” he rasped, raising two fingers to pull his smoke from his mouth. “Well, you know how it is… “

“How what is?”

That was when I noticed his cigarette was glowing from both ends. I watched with a kind of blank wonder as he closed his lips about the burning inner tip. It seemed I could smell his lips sizzle.

“There’s dead for me,” he said, “and then there’s dead for you.” I sat paralyzed while he watched me with those fucking he-he eyes of his.

“What’s that?” I finally asked, looking down at the hockey bag.

“Good question.” He leaned forward, smiling at me, squinting against the smoke of his cigarette as he grabbed the zipper and tore it open. He peered into the dark maw, shook his head with a Southerner’s slow- motion disgust. Sean had grown up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he had started drinking Jack Daniel’s (where his father worked) at the age of nine.

“Aw, hell,” he said, shaking his head in a blue-stringed haze of smoke. “She’s all busted up.”

“She…” I repeated in horror.

“Shiyit. What a nasty piece of work.”

“Who?” I cried.

He had this way of frowning, as if wincing at a pain that was all yours.

“Yah, you know. Dead Jennifer.”

Her name still comes up in my dreams, rare as they are. Dreams of doom-as bad as anything from the war. Without exception I bolt from my blankets, grope the night table to palm my Zippo and cigarettes. I smoke in the dark, watching that orange jewel hover above the shadow of my hand.

And I wonder what it would be like, burning the world from both ends. Wednesday… Pretty much everyone loves spring, except those winter-loving mutants who are generally too cheerful not to die of cancer at some point. I love spring as well, but for reasons peculiar to me. Most people love the retreat of the snow and cold, the dawning of things green and alive. Me, I love the way the thaw exposes all the hidden garbage, from soggy coffee cups to pockets of dog shit.

Winter is a season of forgetfulness. Spring is a kind of remembering, in all its splendid ugliness.

And so spring reminds me of me-the one thing guaranteed to bring a smile to my face.

What does this have to do with Ruddick in the dry height of summer? Because for me, anyway, the town was locked in wintry silence. It needed to be thawed.

My breakfast with Molly was uneventful. She tried to strike up conversation, but I’m too much of a prick in the mornings to trust myself with small talk. Coffee-coffee-coffee-need I say more?

I didn’t so much explain my MO to Molly as demonstrate it. I had her feed me directions from my town map as I rattled around in my Vee-Dub diesel. Once I got a feel for the communities adjacent to the Framer Compound, I began canvassing. I grabbed the flyers that Kimberley had printed for me using the photo of Dead Jennifer that the Bonjours had provided. I parked on a strategic corner, then, with the quizzical redhead in tow, began going door to door with an official-looking clipboard and envelope held like an accountant’s ledger in my arms.

“Hi, ma’am. Sorry to trouble you. I’m going round town to take up a collection for the Bonjour family, to help pay for a private investigator to look into their daughter’s disappearance.”