Max Collins - Midnight Haul

“Please. I’m still eating.”

“I just want you to understand that I’m in this only for one reason: Mary Beth. I want to know what really happened to her.”

“That’s easy. Kemco killed her.”

“Kemco didn’t kill her. Possibly some people that work for Kemco did.”

“Kemco killed her. You’re playing games with semantics, Crane.”

“I’m not playing any kind of game !” He was standing. Angry.

“It hurts, doesn’t it, Crane?”

“S-sorry,” he said. Sitting back down.

“I know it hurts.”

He felt words tumble out. “I dream about her. Every night. It’s not the same, exact dream every night. But it’s always Mary Beth, and she’s alive, and we’re together, and we’re doing something, anything. Picnic, a play, at home listening to music and talking. Then I remember she’s dead. Sometimes she touches my lips and shakes her head, smiling: ‘Don’t think about it,’ she’s saying. Sometimes she just disappears.”

He was dreaming now. Mary Beth was sitting by him in a car.

“Crane,” Boone was saying, “wake up.”

He opened his eyes. Lights were coming down on them.

“It’s a truck, schmuck,” she said, crawling over on him, awkwardly.

They embraced.

The truck roared by; emblazoned on its side was KEMCO.

“One of their own,” Boone said, still in his lap, looking back at the receding semi. “That’s no midnight hauler. They’re carrying product, not waste.”

“Here comes another.”

They kissed for a while, as half a dozen trucks rolled by; one truck honked, and they looked up, startled: a truck driver was smiling and waving at them.

When the trucks had passed, Boone got back over in the driver’s seat and said, “We might as well call it a night.”

“Right.”

“They’re not hauling any waste out of here tonight.”

“Right.”

Boone started the car, pulled onto the road. Crane felt uneasy, and a little ashamed, as he had back in the church, at Mary Beth’s funeral, when he’d seen Boone and got an erection. Like the one he had now.

Boone seemed a little uneasy herself.

Behind them, Kemco, like a bad dream, faded. And lingered.

Harry Woll, a foreman at Kemco, had been dead just over a year. He’d taken an overdose of sleeping pills, washing it down with Scotch; that was the story. The house he’d lived in was two blocks from Boone’s. Crane walked there.

It was another cool night. Crane wore his jacket, but it didn’t keep his teeth from chattering. He supposed that was nerves, more than anything. He didn’t like doing this. He couldn’t have felt more uncomfortable.

Woll’s house was one of several newer, one-story homes at the tail end of Woodlawn, a side street. There was a well-kept lawn with some shrubbery around the front of the pale green house, but there were no trees, which was unusual for Greenwood. The porch light was on.

Crane knocked on the front door.

A pretty redheaded girl of about fourteen, wearing snug jeans and a white T-shirt, answered. The T-shirt had a TWISTED SISTER logo on it; under it were pushy, precocious breasts that made the logo bulge. She looked at Crane and pretended to be sullen, calling out, “Mom! It’s that guy who called.”

The girl leaned against the door and a smile tugged at the corners of her pouty mouth. Crane gave her a noncommittal smile and looked away.

“Mr. Crane?”

Mrs. Woll was a slender, attractive woman about forty doing a good job of passing for being in her mid-thirties. She wore a light blue cardigan sweater over a pastel floral blouse and light blue slacks. Her hair was dark honey blonde and rather heavily sprayed. She had the face of a cheerleader or homecoming queen, twenty years later.

She extended a hand to him and gave him a dazzling smile. “It’s nice to see you, Mr. Crane.”

He managed to return her smile, but the warm reception threw him: why was she so pleased to see him? She’d never met him before.

He stepped inside.

“Take Mr. Crane’s jacket, dear,” she told her daughter.

The daughter took his jacket, brushing her breasts against him as she did, and tossed the jacket in a chair by the door.

“Would you like some coffee?” Mrs. Woll asked him, taking his arm, leading him to a sofa nearby, a painting of the crashing tide above it, one of several undistinguished oil paintings that hung in a living room of white pebble-plaster walls and contemporary furniture. The place was immaculate; either she was some housekeeper or had cleaned up because company was coming.

He said thanks, yes, to her offer of coffee and she left him to go get it. The fourteen-year-old redhead stood and looked at him and let her pout turn into a full-fledged smile and, butt twitching, walked into the next room, from which he soon heard a situation comedy and its laugh-track, TV turned up loud enough to be annoying on purpose.

Mrs. Woll brought Crane the coffee, smiled, and went into the room where the fourteen-year-old had gone, and the TV sound went down. Some.

While this was going on, he glanced at the far end of the room, where a color studio photo of the Woll family, taken perhaps five years ago, hung above a spinet piano. In the picture, Mrs. Woll looked heavier, sadder; an older daughter, about fifteen in this picture, wore a lot of makeup and wasn’t quite as pretty as the younger daughter (who was just a kid, here) was turning out to be. Mr. Woll was a jowly redheaded man, whose smile seemed forced even for a studio portrait.

Mrs. Woll came back and sat down next to Crane. “Now. You said you wanted to talk to me.”

“It’s very considerate of you to see me, Mrs. Woll. To agree to talk with me.”

“Mr. Crane, I understand what you’re going through, losing someone you love. If I can be of any help to you, in such a difficult time, I’m more than happy.”

“Your husband’s... death. Did it come as a shock to you?”

“My husband’s suicide , Mr. Crane. It’s important not to evade reality. You can use euphemisms, if you like, but I’ve found they’re not really helpful. The sooner you face up to your fiancée’s death as suicide , and deal with it honestly, the sooner you can get back about the business of your life.”

“Yes. But did it come as a shock to you? By that I mean, did it happen out of left field, or was Mr. Woll suffering from depression in the weeks preceding his... suicide?”

“I can’t really say. My guess would be, yes, he was depressed.”

“Your guess?”

“Mr. Woll and I were separated at the time of his suicide. We might have gone on to get a divorce; it’s hard to say.”

“What was the problem, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“His moods. He’d always been a moody individual, but it had gotten worse lately. At times, he even hit me. His daughters, as well. We have two girls, Jenifer you’ve met, Angie, who’s nineteen, moved out and got her own apartment when she turned eighteen.”

“Was that before or after Mr. Woll died?”

“Killed himself. Before. Harry couldn’t handle the changes I was going through.”

“Changes?”

“Mr. Crane, for nineteen years of marriage I worked, just like he worked. In fact, I brought in only a few dollars a month less than he did. But in addition to my job, I was supposed to be a full-time housewife, as well — do all the cleaning, cooking, laundry. What extra effort did Harry make to help out around the house? Nothing. Not a thing. I put up with it for years. Years. Then finally I guess my consciousness got raised, like with a lot of women, and I put an end to it. I told Harry we could afford a cleaning woman. He blew up! But I hired her anyway. I told him he could either learn to cook, or start taking us out for meals. He laughed at that, but it didn’t strike him so funny when he started coming home from work to no supper prepared, every other night. And so we started going out to eat a few nights each week. Our life-style changed — but Harry didn’t, not really. I thought sharing the work load fifty-fifty was only fair, but he didn’t see it that way. He said he was old-fashioned, like that explained it. And he drank, he drank too much. I tried to get him to enroll in AA, and that made him furious. We had some very unpleasant months around here.”