Joe Lansdale - Leather Maiden

“You were stubborn, you were obsessed with the idea that the truth was being thwarted, that Santa was testing you. You hung on to that past any time any reasonable person might. And then one day, you got it. You knew the truth. It wasn’t about hearing it. It wasn’t even about understanding it. It was about believing it.”

“I get the point.”

“Look at me, Cason. She doesn’t love you. I’m sorry. It’s sad. I like Gabby, and I love you, but she doesn’t. It’s time you took all the Gabby stuff, the memories, put it in a box and put it in the attic, so to speak. You have to put it out of your mind.”

“You make it sound easy.”

“I know it isn’t. The doctor, what did he say?”

“That I’m obsessed. That I have problems from the war. That and a buck fifty might get me a ride on the horsey out front of the Wal-Mart.”

“Knowing and believing is the way you solve it.”

“Sounds like a bumper sticker.”

“I suppose it does.”

Jimmy got up and went to the window and I sat down at my desk. We stayed like that for a long time. Finally, I said, “Thing I’m looking into at work, it sort of crosses with your life.”

He turned from the window, leaned against the wall. “How’s that?”

“A missing-person story. Probably a murder.”

“Oh.”

“Caroline Allison. She was a history major.”

Jimmy moved away from the wall and went to his old desk and sat down in his chair and picked up a pencil and used it to poke at his stuffed frogs and mice.

“What brought that up?” he said.

“The job,” I said. “Looking for a place to get started. Columns to write. The lady who was there before me picked it out. I looked it over, liked the idea of it. All she had were some notes. I’ve been looking up a few things. You must have known her, right?”

“Everyone in the department was very aware of her. She was quite beautiful.”

“I’ve seen her photographs. She was more than beautiful. She looks, or should I say looked, sort of otherworldly.”

“She did. Yes.” He pushed at the frog with the pencil until it fell over. I didn’t feel quite as bad for messing with his keepsakes.

“Maybe you know something I could put in the article. Something about her.”

“All I can tell you was she was gorgeous. Everyone in the department liked her. The guys anyway. I mean, you know how it is, good-looking girl and all. She was smart, and she was going to be a crack historian.”

“You said everyone in the department, the guys anyway, liked her. What about outside the department?”

“Her personal life?”

“What do you know of it?”

“Nothing really. She didn’t talk much about her life.”

“If the guys liked her, how did the women feel?”

“Jealous. They knew she was a force of nature though. If you’re getting at someone in the history department hating her enough to kidnap or kill her because she was a fox, I don’t think so.”

“A woman looked that way could drive someone crazy, even if she didn’t know them. Might make them do things they might not normally do.”

“So it’s her fault?” Jimmy said.

“I don’t mean it that way. Of course, whoever did what they did to her, they made the choice. Just saying, if there was someone out there two ounces short a pound, a woman like that, it could be the thing to set them off…Is this bothering you, Jimmy?”

He nodded. “She was a good kid. Just disappearing like that, it was painful. She’d been in a couple classes I taught. She had a great future. I was quite sick about it.”

“Sorry.”

“No biggie. It’s what it is. No point in wishing things were different. She’s gone…You know what? I think I’d like a cup of coffee. How about you?”

It wasn’t a clever change of subject, but it was successful enough. Jimmy was already up and moving out of the room when I said, “Dying for one.”

When we passed through the living room on the way to the kitchen, we saw that Jazzy was asleep on the couch. Someone, Mom probably, had covered her with a blanket.

Coming into the kitchen, Jimmy said, “Jazzy is out for the count.”

Mom and Dad and Trixie were sitting at the table, already enjoying coffee. Mom said, “Keep it down. She’s exhausted. I bet she slept in that tree last night. Sometimes they lock her out.”

“Why won’t someone do something?” Jimmy asked.

“That’s what we’d like to know,” Dad said. “We haven’t even seen her mother or her latest shitass come out of the house in a couple days.”

“Pete, don’t talk like that,” Mom said.

Dad ignored her as usual. “Her mother stays inside most of the time, like she’s afraid of the light. I don’t think she works, unless it’s over the telephone. The new daddy, he has a van with something about upholstery work written on the side, so maybe he does upholstery at home. But my guess is he isn’t a working fool. And then there’s the former Daddy Greg, who I guess is just Greg now. He comes around now and then. No telling what Jazzy sees. That girl needs a better home life.”

“Bless her heart,” Mom said. “Jazzy is a smart little thing. She can learn anything.”

“She’s being wasted,” Dad said.

Mom patted Dad’s hand. “I know, but all we can do is stay on Protective Services.”

Jimmy and I went over to the cabinet for some coffee cups, got coffee from the coffeemaker and sat down at the table.

“She’ll spend the night here,” Mom said. “And I bet her mother and her newest daddy won’t even miss her.”

“Drunk bastards,” Dad said. “Or maybe it’s something else they’re hopped up on. Or maybe they aren’t hopped up on anything, it’s just the way they act. Hard to tell.”

“Hopped up?” Jimmy said. “People still say that?”

“I do,” said Dad.

“How about twenty-three skidoo?” Jimmy said.

“Or Oh you, kid,” I said.

“Or the bee’s knees,” Trixie said.

Dad grinned at us. “You’re asking for it, busters. And you too, young lady.”

That night, after my brother and his wife left and everyone had gone to bed, I sat at my old desk and glanced through the file Mercury had put together for me. I found myself looking at Caroline’s picture over and over. I read through all the notes and filled my head with all the facts that were available. It was like planting seeds in my gray matter, trying to get them to take root and break through and bloom.

I looked for clues as if I might find them: Colonel Mustard in the study with the wrench. That sort of thing. I thought of how terrible and surprising it might have been for her, attacked by someone she trusted most likely, since that’s the way it usually worked out.

It wasn’t a pleasant thing to think about before bedtime, but I stayed with it, tried to figure a little of this and a little of that. There were no parents to talk to. No relatives she was really connected to. There was just the girl who said she hadn’t paid her movie rental bill, her library fine. The girl’s name was Ronnie Fisher and there was an address for her, but I didn’t see much in that. Still, I made a note to contact her. I finally went to bed. This time I didn’t dream.

11

A month went by, and for some reason, though it interested me the most, I couldn’t get up enough of a head of steam to write about Caroline Allison. I knew how I wanted to write about her, but for whatever reason I didn’t have enough gas in the tank. I think the business with Gabby had evaporated my fuel.

There were people I ought to interview so I could get a larger picture of who she was and what might have happened to her, but I wasn’t up to it. I was having a hard enough time just learning to be me again, not waking up and thinking I was still in Iraq and that pretty soon I’d be on the streets with my rifle and my asshole clenched, hoping today wouldn’t be the day I got my head blown off.