Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“They’re animal bones?”

“Oh, shit yeah. Pork chops and chicken.”

The propane man recalls seeing an additional woman, who lay on a cot with a blanket over her head for the entire time he was there. In July heat. Silliman elects not to show him the photo of the famous fugitive. No sense inviting every crank in the county to put their two cents in. He waits for the dogs to arrive on their chartered flight from California. They go apeshit when they get a whiff of the cot.

Chartered flight. He likes that.

“Let’s go in. I’m freezing my ass off.”

Inside the house, furniture is draped with dropcloths while dusting for prints goes on nearby. No visibles. No plastic impressions. No latents so far, though there are plenty of indications the place has been wiped, not least of which is that there are no prints. But this is not evidence, this is not admissible, this is merely suspicious, something that gives cops a reason for rising each morning and banging their heads against the wall. Dusting continues. Elsewhere, where dusting and evidence gathering and photographing have already happened, the government men have tossed the place. Silliman knows the fugitives were here. Because there’s no sign they were here.

Silliman goes through pockets in the mudroom. He finds receipts from local vendors dating back to the mid-sixties. He finds a shopping list that mentions “Tricks Cereal for Brian and Tim” and concludes that this is the work of Mrs. Lafferty, whoever she is or was. He finds thirty-seven cents in change, including a dime and a penny minted in 1974. He bags the coins. He bags a Bic pen that has bled half its ink into the pocket of an old field jacket. Screaming Eagles patch on the shoulder. He finds a book of matches advertising the U.S. Auto School and bags that too. In a Lee Riders jacket that looks as if it would fit someone about sixteen years old, he finds a beat-up copy of Penthouse Forum . It falls open to a certain page.

Dear Penthouse Forum:

I want to write about the greatest oral sex I have ever had. Now let me say that due to my above-average (ten inches) endowment I have never had satisfactory oral pleasure from any woman. I have long wanted someone who would eat me — all of me — whenever I so desired, swallowing all of the frothing sperm cocktail I pumped into her soft willing mouth, while asking nothing more in return than to be regularly walked, fed, and watered, the ultimate lover and soul mate. Well, in my four-year-old collie Donna I have found mine. Donna is gorgeous, with a long, silky coat and expressive brown eyes. One day when she was a puppy I awoke to find her licking dried sperm from my abdomen (I’d fallen asleep after jerking off). Well, one thing led to another and before I knew it I’d trained her to pleasure me orally. Now, let me tell you about the beautiful blow jobs I receive from Donna. Not once in four years has she bitten me, not even a nip. Well,

Silliman closes the magazine. It does get lonely out here, he guesses. Brian? Tim? Lieutenant Lafferty himself, dreaming of the firehouse Dalmatian? He bags it.

He went to bed one night a spectator and awoke — was awoken, actually — the next morning, engulfed. A weird feeling. He’s followed the whole thing in the papers and on the news. It’s the Bureau’s case, but it seemed to have little to do with anything he knows. Scranton Resident does some organized crime. It works with Treasury on bootleg cigarette sales and such. There are bank robberies; some laid-off mine worker will wander into a local branch with a peremptory note and wander out with a paper bag full of a thousand dollars in bait bills. It is not, in short, a glamour assignment. Now here comes this case, straight from California, filtered through the gaunt sunlight of a Pennsylvania winter. California’s not big enough for all the craziness it engenders? Silliman has twenty years in the Bureau. Silliman understands criminal pathology. He understands the easy money mentality of some moron who drives across state lines in a truck loaded with butts missing their revenue stamps. He understands the miner whose wife closes the fridge and says there’s no food and there isn’t going to be any. He understands a lot of things, but he has trouble understanding these boys and girls who seem to want a different sort of government. What for? He is the government, and he can assure these kids that any conceivable alternative would have men just like him, doing just what he does, at its heart. Of course they wouldn’t believe this. He tries to imagine what they do believe but can envision only a buzzing rush of static in his head: a void, chaotic. It scares the living shit out of him. It has nothing to do with Pennsylvania. What do these sturdy old farmhouses have to do with revolution?

His wife always wants to go out to California. She thinks it’s one big beach, full of movie stars.

Silliman feels that he occupies the quietest zone in the case. Every day he enters a house that in its placid inscrutability tells him little yet offers the most reliable view into the missing girl’s daily life. She stood here, she sat there. Washed her dishes in this sink. When she came out and stood on the top step, this is what she would have seen. He drives down the road and walks the same three aisles she would have walked at the country store. Pork chops and chicken.

The furious storm, and he’s at its eye. The papers have been full of it lately: no breaks, no news, the case already a year old. So quiet here: you could go nuts. But for now he wants to hold the isolation close. The press doesn’t yet know about this place. After interrogating him, Silliman recommended that the Bureau immediately ship Ernest Mock overseas on an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe. He didn’t think Mock would be able to keep his mouth shut for a second.

Just as Silliman is about to wrap it up for the day, an investigator comes into the room holding a bag containing a folded, crumpled section of newspaper, six months old. The New York Times , perfect. It has been discovered stuffed into a hole in the underside of one of the mattresses upstairs. That’s a good find. That looks promising. Silliman tells the investigator so; he likes his men to feel as if they’re not totally wasting their time.

Back in Scranton the next afternoon, Silliman gets a call from the fingerprint examiner at the lab in Philly. He has managed to lift a latent partial print from one of the fragments recovered from the garbage pit, a piece of a shattered drinking glass. In the expert opinion of the fingerprint examiner, the print matches one on file with the United States Marine Corps listed as belonging to Andrew Carlyle Shepard, aka Richard Frank Dennis, aka William Kinder, aka Jonathan Maris, aka Jonathan Mark Salamone, aka General Teko of the Symbionese Liberation Army, currently wanted by the United States of America for violation of the National Firearms Act. The examiner also mentions that using ninhydrin spray, they managed to develop prints on the section of newspaper discovered in the mattress. No match as yet, but the examiner notes casually that the prints display the frequent whorls characteristically found on persons of Oriental origin.

GUY WANDERS INTO A strip club, a workingman’s place off the highway: a perfect place to sit, think, and throw away a little more money. The girls onstage are dancing, if dancing is the word; mostly they sway off beat to contemporary hits, swinging from smudgy chrome poles.

There’s not much to strip. Girls taking the stage wear a bra, heels, and a G-string, with maybe a boa or a cowboy hat, tops. “Midnight at the Oasis” is fading out as Guy takes his seat at the bar, and by the time his beer arrives Marvin Hamlisch’s version of “The Entertainer” is forlornly playing out. Guy figures he is witnessing an unusual confluence of indigenous American imaginative artifacts. A song written around the turn of the century to be performed in the genteel parlors of bordellos — scandalous then but currently popular as a nostalgic evocation, albeit a jarringly anachronistic one, of the 1930s — is serving as the accompaniment to a contemporary and aggressively vulgar display that falsely promises the sex the whorehouses delivered but hid from public view.