Sleeping Policemen Page 5

  —friend—

  —inadequate, hurtful.

  Nick blushed, suddenly sorry he had come. “I just wanted that book,” he said off the top of his head.

  “The book. Right.” Coldly, she added: “I’ll get it.” They listened to her mount the stairs, Mira in her shiny pantsuit, Campbell in a summer sweater of hand-woven silk, Nick in torn Levis and a pair of beat-up work boots he had stolen from Jake last Christmas. Nick scratched his head, studied the weave of the carpet.

  Mira Thompson cleared her throat. “Where are you from, Rick?”

  He stammered, started to correct her, thought better of it. He managed to get it out at last: “Louisiana.” He coughed, abruptly conscious of his bayou accent, so different from the honeyed cadence of old Savannah.

  Suddenly he understood Sue’s reluctance to bring him here, to introduce him to such people.

  And hated himself for it.

  “Mira and I just love New Orleans. Went down for Mardi Gras—what was it, Mira, five years ago?”

  Nick studied his boots.

  “What do your folks do down there, son?”

  “Sales,” Nick said. It might have been the most shameful moment of his life. He smiled weakly. “Dad’s in—”

  Sue saved him. She appeared at the bottom of the stairs in a rush, thrusting a paperback at him. He shoved it in a back pocket without even glancing at the title.

  “I’ll be off then.”

  An awkward moment passed, everyone standing and talking simultaneously, handshakes exchanged, and then Nick found himself on the stoop alone with Sue, staring into her angry face.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll call—”

  “I’ll call you.”

  But she did not.

  In the days that followed, Nick blew off classes, drank beer, and studied the book she had given him—an unread copy of Sons and Lovers from the British novel class—for answers to questions he dared not ask. The third afternoon—a sullen, rainy day that reflected Nick’s mood—she showed up at his door.

  “What’s up, Nicky?” she said, dropping her coat. There was nothing underneath, just the long, slim lines of the body that haunted his dreams. He knelt before her.

  “Nick,” she said. “Oh, Nick.”

  Neither of them ever mentioned her parents again.

  “Hey, buddy!”

  Nick turned. The ticket attendant rested his elbows on the counter.

  “You talking to me?”

  “You the one with that redhead, the two fellas?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Outside. Said they’d be in the car.”

  Nick nodded, a knot loosening in his chest. That sense of resentment—the three of them closing ranks against him—retreated a little. Waiting. “Thanks.”

  Nick hurried to the stairs, anxious to escape the bus station’s contagion of fried food and diesel fuel, the doubt spreading like infection in his mind. He glimpsed the Mercedes, an electric blue SEL 450, at the curb through the old men clustered outside the door. They turned to look at him as he passed among them, their faces inscrutable. The cold was like a wall.

  “Hey, pal?”

  A hand touched his elbow.

  “Hey.”

  Nick glanced over his shoulder, clasping the mailer against his chest. A seamed face leaned toward him: booze-stained eyes and stubbled jaw, teeth yellow and slick-looking in a smile that wanted something. A shit-eating grin, Nick’s father would have called it. The old man’s breath hung between them like a veil, a reek of cigarettes and cheap wine.

  “You got a buck? Coffee?”

  Involuntarily, Nick’s hand clutched his jacket, the roll of bills curled there, seed of a future as yet unborn. But a future.

  “I’m in a hurry.”

  He started for the car, but the hand touched his elbow once again, gripping this time.

  He turned. “Let me go, man.”

  “In a fuckin Mercedes and you can’t spare a measly buck, friend?”

  “It’s not my car—”

  “You ain’t like them, huh?”

  Nick hesitated, wrenched his arm away. He turned to the car, digging in his jeans. The old man reached out for him once again, jarring his elbow as Nick lifted out a handful of change. Silver rained against the broken sidewalk, but none of them moved. Not Nick and not the old man, not the bums gathered beyond him.

  Nick met the old man’s bleary eyes for a single instant longer, and then he turned away.

  “So let’s see what’s inside,” Tucker said from the back seat.

  Nick slid a finger under the flap and tore open the end of the mailer. He could hear the silence, sense the three of them lean toward him as he tilted the contents into his hand.

  A videotape.

  No one said anything. The Mercedes sped south into the gathering twilight, leaving Knoxville behind.

  Casey, the typewritten label read. Tape 14.

  Nick shook the tape from its cardboard box; Finney’s VCR swallowed it silently, its digital display flaring alight. He heard the spools catch with a click. The screen fuzzed over as the leader unwound, then gave way to a flawless ebony emptiness. Nick glanced at the others, mere shapes in the darkened room. Finney slouched with his arms crossed over the back of a kitchen chair, his face expressionless. Tucker sat rigidly in the recliner, chewing at a nail. Sue waited on the sofa. Nick stepped over the coffee table and sank into the cushions beside her, grateful for her warmth as she leaned against him.

  On the screen, blackness. No music.

  A title came up, white letters against a jet background: Casey. A moment later, the screen brightened to gray, a porous alien field rendered in stark precision. Gradually the camera pulled back and the gray field revealed itself as one wall of a cinderblock room, bright and sterile as a surgery. The camera held there for a moment, dipped to reveal a steel drain set in the center of a concrete floor, and then panned slowly, gray floor slipping by. Only then did Nick realize that there was sound, that there had been for some time, almost subliminal at first but growing slowly louder: muted sobs.

  Tension writhed in his belly.

  The first glimpse of color was like an electric shock: a dull steel band encircling a pale ankle. The camera climbed the leg slowly, caressing knee and thigh and finally the tangled thatch of pubic hair, black against translucent flesh, with the faintest coral hint of female genitals curled within. As it climbed higher, over a slight, rounded belly and girlish breasts, Nick felt his cock stiffening almost against his will. Sue moved still closer against him, her hand heavy on his thigh.

  “Some kind a freaky titty movie,” Tucker said, and for once Nick had to agree with him.

  Then the camera came to rest on the girl’s face, heart-shaped and fragile and not wholly formed, poised at the tremulous frontier of adolescence, no longer a girl and not quite a woman, maybe seventeen, maybe not. Her beauty was like an ache way down inside him. Dark hair curled around her pale shoulders and her green eyes gazed directly into the lens with a terrifying intensity. A bright, bright ribbon of blood flowed from the corner of her mouth.

  And she sobbed, a constant, defeated hitching of breath.

  “I got a bad feeling about this,” Finney said into the silence, and at the same time another figure stepped into the frame: an enormous man with his back to the camera, naked but for the black leather hood zipped over his head. Sobs caught and died in the girl’s throat. She backed away, and Nick saw how she was bound, steel shackles at wrist and ankle, connected by lengths of narrow chain to bolts in the concrete floor.

  Another man, about Nick’s size, and also hooded, stepped into the picture, his penis half-erect in a nest of brown hair. The hooded men caught the girl between them and lowered her wide-eyed and empty of resistance to the floor. The big man held her prone while the other man shortened the chains, giving the girl no more than a foot of play. The big man stepped out of frame and returned with two padded mats. He placed one in front of the girl, and one between her outsp
read thighs. The smaller man knelt behind the exposed mounds of her buttocks, stroking himself. The big man stepped in front of the girl, and now Nick saw that he had something in his hand. Something bone-handled, something shiny. It flickered and caught the light, and Nick felt an icy hand close around his heart.

  A knife.

  An off-camera voice spoke up.

  “Now then,” it said, masculine and precise. “Let us begin.”

  “It’s a fake,” Tucker said.

  But if it was a fake it was artfully done. The off-screen voice orchestrated changes in position; the two men were tireless. At one point, the big man sodomized her, while the smaller man knelt before her and pressed the knife to her throat, forcing her to fellate him. Nick stared in fascination at the narrow, crimson thread snaking down her breast to drip on the floor, helpless to turn away from the horror on screen. Sue whimpered, curled tighter into the shelter of his arm. He had to force himself not to recoil, shamed by the iron spike of his erection.

  When they started to cut her, the girl began to scream. She screamed for a long time, and the sounds echoed in Nick’s head. Still he forced himself to believe that it was all pretend, that after the take ended the three would get up, shake hands like professionals, and walk away.

  Then the men took the girl’s tongue and all screams stopped together. In the moment that followed, as wordless grunts and groans filled the room, he knew better.

  “It’s not a fake,” he said.

  “I think we ought to turn this off,” Finney said.

  “Me, too,” said Nick.

  But he didn’t move. None of them did.

  Helpless to turn away, mesmerized, Nick felt reality slip, time grown fluid, Finney’s living room tainted with the smoky air of the strip joint, the flickering television screen a curtained doorway into a world he had never dared imagine.

  He could not—would not—look away.

  After a while, both men came. But the film didn’t end there. The two men on screen were good.

  They kept the girl alive for a long time.

  Monday, 10:06 AM to 1:30 PM

  Nick slept through his nine o’clock sociology, but forced himself to his 11 o’clock, Twentieth-Century Novel with Dr. Gillespie. He seriously considered ditching the entire day, but after last night, after the tape, he ached for routine and order. He and Sue had talked long into the night, falling into a fitful doze just before dawn. His dreams had been a tumble of half-formed images, ogres in masks, girls in pain.

  He woke at 10:06, his penis rigid against his stomach, a vision of the writhing girl—

  —Casey, her name was Casey—

  —dissolving in the cool air above him. A disembodied voice uncoiled in the room, the words indecipherable. Nick caught his breath; the sounds carried the same clipped cadence as the voice behind the videotape, the one whose last command—a bark harsh with desire—still reverberated in his head: “Finish her!”

  He did not think he would ever forget the tape’s final moments, the bigger of the two masked men wrenching the girl’s head back, his fist knotted in her hair. And the knife. My God, the knife—

  Nick swallowed, shuddering.

  He took a deep breath, forcing the tape from his mind, and slid out from under Sue’s arms. He showered and dressed quickly, grabbed his book bag, and slipped silently out of the apartment, half-jogging the four blocks to campus. Dr. Gillespie was just starting roll as he slid into his seat.

  “So,” Dr. Gillespie said, snapping his roll book shut, “we spoke last time of Gatsby’s illusions—of the way he disregards the fleetness of time, insisting that you can repeat the past.” Dr. Gillespie strode slowly from the lectern, his arms crossed, his head cocked in a professorial attitude. “We saw how Gatsby’s entire life—all the opulence and excess—is caught up in his revisioning of Daisy Buchanan, the entire unwieldy scaffold of his aspirations symbolized in the ephemeral shimmer of a distant, green light.” He surveyed the class, his eyes like flint.

  “What’s your opinion, Mr. Kilpatrick?” Across the room from Nick, a pock-marked boy started from a doze and stammered a series of half-formed thoughts. Nick looked down at his book, bought well-thumbed at a used bookstore in Knoxville. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. He had read almost half of it in a single sitting Saturday afternoon, enjoying it immensely. Carraway’s eloquent voice, his controlled measure of life won Nick over immediately. Nick had put the novel aside only when Finney and Tucker barged into his apartment and dragged him away with the promise of flesh and beer. He wished he had stayed and finished the book.

  He closed his eyes and Casey filled his mind, her face contorted, her body stretched into impossible positions, pain not nearly a big enough word for what he saw in her eyes.

  The tape ended in abrupt darkness, as if the voice behind the camera had yanked a plug. The four of them had sat silently for several minutes. Then Tucker muttered a quiet, “Goddamn.” Wordlessly, Sue stood and stalked away; with a final lingering glance at the television, Nick followed. Finney caught them at the door, his face pale and worried.

  “Wait a minute, Nick. We have to talk about this.”

  “Not tonight,” Sue said, and for a moment, Nick only stood there, caught between them.

  He started to speak, his mouth dry. “Can I—” The question died on his lips as he thought how it would sound, what they might think of him.

  “What?” Finney said.

  The tape. Can I have the tape?

  “Nothing,” he said.

  Sue tugged at his sleeve. “Come on.”

  They had barely reached Sue’s car when the townhouse door swung open once again. “We need to talk about this.”

  “Tomorrow,” Nick called over his shoulder.

  “Donner’s, then. Lunch.”

  Later, in bed, Sue said, “Who do you think she was?”

  “No idea.” He paused. It was 12:16. “Just a girl, wrong place, wrong time. Someone passing through. Someone they took from some other nowhere.” His voice sounded muffled, as if the dark swallowed the words as they left his mouth.

  “Bastards.” Her voice was hard, unrelenting.

  “Yeah,” he said, wrapping his arms around her, pressing his lips to her forehead.

  “Mr. Kilpatrick, that’s quite enough,” Dr. Gillespie said, drawing Nick back into the classroom. “I suggest you spend a little more time with Mr. Fitzgerald tonight.” He returned to the lectern and resumed his discourse. Nick forced himself to listen.

  “Gatsby has reinvented himself. Shedding the skin of his old self, James Gatz, a poor boy from nowhere, molting into a dazzling new self. In the same way, he attempts to recreate Daisy, forcing her, ironically, to be forever the woman—the girl—he’d known five years previously.” Gillespie paused and stared at the class, his eyes like shards of broken glass.

  “Where do we first see Gatsby?”

  “At the dock, watching Daisy’s mansion across the bay,” Nick said. He’d read a little less than half the novel, but he knew the game. Answer what you do know, quickly, then dodge back into the underbrush. He had no idea what fate awaited Gatsby and Daisy in the deep end of the novel, but he recognized the ominous portents. He wondered if Casey had been in school, and where. His stomach roiled. Again he watched the trickle of blood roll slowly across her breast.

  “Very good, Mr. Laymon. Glad you’re back with us.” Gillespie paced to the door and back to the lectern. “His arms outstretched, his longing like something palpable. That green light at the end of the Buchanan pier—it becomes symbolic of all that Gatsby dreams of and hopes for and devotes his life to. A green light as vibrant as life itself, as evasive and insubstantial as starlight. A symbol of elusiveness.” Gillespie smiled. “The green light,” he whispered, arms outstretched.

  He paused dramatically and then strolled to the far end of the classroom, his words running together in Nick’s mind. He thought back to something Sue had said last night. He must have nodded off because the next thing he
knew Sue was in mid-sentence and the clock beside his bed read 3:11. Darkness cloaked the room, the moon behind heavy clouds. The clock bathed them in a red glow.

  Like radiation, Nick thought.

  “—Carrie Witherspoon but everyone called her Spoon because she’d scoop up just about anything.” Sue talked as if in a trance, her voice low and thoughtful. “She wanted to come to the college but couldn’t afford it. I think her Mom works somewhere on campus, a janitor or something. Carrie worked down at the Duracell plant, but she spent most of her nights up here on campus. I ran into her a couple of times at the Torkelsons’ parties.” Sue shivered.

  Nick remembered her, a dark-haired, skinny girl. Not ugly, but not pretty either. A plain girl, just like the ones he’d known in Glory, girls desperate to scale the walls of their claustrophobic lives. All they walked and talked was deliverance—and most of them, including Carrie Witherspoon, attempted to earn it on their backs. Somewhere in the dimly lit recesses of his mind—behind the leering visage of the dead guy, just beyond the yawning maw of Casey’s pain—Nick seemed to remember something else about Carrie, something that stirred the campus.

  “What about her?” he asked Sue.

  “Don’t you remember?” Sue sat up and turned toward him. “She disappeared the fall of our sophomore year.” Nick remembered then. “Have you Seen Me?” fliers peppered the campus for a couple of weeks and once her mother—a hulking and bedraggled cafeteria lady, he recalled, not a janitor—showed up at one of the fall parties, asking questions. He could still see the haunted look in her eyes.

  After that, nothing, as if Carrie Witherspoon had fallen into an abyss. Everyone assumed she had finally made her escape, fleeing Ransom for better prospects. Nick hadn’t thought of her since.

  “What if,” Sue said, her voice clipped, as if she measured each word, “she was a number? Number ten or seven or even the very first.” She sounded, just for a second, eerily like the videotape’s voice.

  A cold rush—colder than that mountain stream—flowed through Nick. Casey filled his head, her face a rictus of terror. What’s it like, he thought, to be that scared? Sue lay down beside him and Nick wrapped his arms around her. “Oh, Nicky,” she said, breathing into the cup of his throat. He lay awake for a long time, watching shadows shift in the dark, nebulous phantoms that transmogrified into screaming mouths, the sleek curve of a crumpled fender, the silhouette of a dead man’s head.