The Man Who Came and Went Read online

  To my two sisters:

  Susan Stillman, whom I’ve been lucky enough to have in my life since it started, and Michele Russell, my acquired sister and North Star for this project at times my compass failed.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Prologue

  Before I can start this story, I have to tell you something that happened near the end of it. I’m sorry if that seems weird, but believe me you’re going to be really glad I did this.

  We were on the road to Phoenix, the five of us. I was sitting in the middle of the back seat. Bill was to my right, looking out the window. Rodney was to my left, lost in thought and silent. Silence was a new experience for Rodney and I have to say it was a vast improvement. I made a mental note to suggest he try it more often.

  Maybell was in the front seat driving. Rose was next to her. Both of them stared at the road ahead. No one was talking. Really, what was there to say after what happened?

  We were in Rose’s car, a white Ford Escort. We thought about taking Martin’s Oldsmobile Cutlass because it was bigger. I really think he would have liked that. But we had already broken enough laws that day, and it was time to get Bill where he needed to go.

  I’m not sure how long we had been riding in silence. Long enough so that the hum of the car became the only sound in the world. I was alone in my thoughts, replaying what happened, trying to make sense of it. And then suddenly, I wasn’t anymore. Alone, I mean. Bill was in there with me, in my thoughts, in my head, talking to me.

  I had never known until that moment what a sanctuary my thoughts had been. It was the one place in the entire universe that belonged only to me. What a beautiful and terrible thing that is, to have such isolation.

  I didn’t exactly hear Bill’s voice. There wasn’t any sound. It was more like a sense of his thinking, which happened to be right next to my own.

  My first reaction was panic. Blind panic, if you really want to know. Who wouldn’t be scared? It felt like being naked in your bed in the middle of the night when suddenly the lights go on and you realize the whole world is in there with you.

  The whole world wasn’t inside my head. But if one person could just come and go willy-nilly, then the very idea of privacy was suddenly blown to pieces. In that moment, reality as I understood it had ended. At the same time, a new and different reality, one that was completely foreign, opened up before me.

  My heart was beating like a jackhammer.

  I will say that, to Bill’s credit, he knew how to calm me down. I don’t know how many times he had done this before, or with how many people, but he was pretty matter-of-fact. He let me know he had something he wanted to tell me, something that couldn’t be said in words or sentences. I didn’t understand at the time, but I do now. The process of speaking—thought to mouth to ear—was all too clumsy. I had never thought of it before as being slow, but Bill had. He said talking was a bit like analog, and what he had to get across to me was more like digital. It was big and complex and could only be imparted directly to my mind.

  And that’s what he did. Thoughts came faster than I knew they could. Scary fast. It would have all been completely nonsensical if Bill hadn’t told me how to take it in. By the time he was done, after Bill had imparted everything he came to say, I finally knew all there was to know.

  I knew the story of Bill.

  I knew the story of Maybell and Rose and Martin and pretty much everyone around us.

  I knew things I couldn’t know.

  About people I didn’t know.

  About things that, until that moment, I would have thought impossible to know.

  The point I’m trying to get across here is that in one very powerful explosion of thought, I knew pretty much the whole story.

  Now I can start. . . .

  I heard the truck pulling in just after midnight. Some nights Maybell would come back with a guy. Some nights not at all. Sometimes Marguerite would drop her off if the pickings were slim. Tonight it was a Ford pickup, an engine I hadn’t heard before.

  The engine cut out. A truck door slammed. Then another closed very slowly. I knew why. Maybell was drunk and having trouble getting out. After that, there was silence. I knew what that meant too. She and the guy were making out on the side of his truck. Maybell liked to get her foreplay out of the way outside.

  On the way out the front door, I picked up my rifle. It had once belonged to Maybell’s father, who died a year before I was born. Maybell had no use for it and even at a young age I was a natural shot. So it pretty much became mine. In my other hand I held a mug that said, “World’s Worst Mother.” I had it specially made. The tea inside, like the love I once had for Maybell, had gone cold.

  I could hear Maybell from the guy’s truck. “Shh, you don’t wanna wake my daughter.”

  The guy had Maybell against the truck, one hand on her breast, the other trying to squeeze its way into her too-tight jeans. If he saw how she bent the laws of physics to get into those jeans, he probably would have let them be.

  None of her conquests had names to me. I called them all Jerkoff Du Jour. I know there are those who excuse guys when they’re only out for sex. It is, after all, just biology. Like dogs in heat, they’re hostage to the primal grip of lust. And once they get their leg-humping out of the way, they can go back to their more civilized selves: fixing your car or teaching your kids math. I get all that. The problem is, I’ve seen these guys at their worst. That’s what Maybell brings out in them. A dog will eventually give you love or loyalty. Maybe fetch a stick. Every guy Maybell brought home would take his sex and go.

  Earlier that night, I had left my bedroom in time to see Maybell reaching for the front door. She was wearing those jeans I mentioned and a dungaree blouse tied above her navel to show off her midriff. Her hair, naturally dark, was colored her favorite shade of blonde. Though her back was to me, I could practically hear her breasts sloshing around. She was dressed for sex and there was not a man in Hadley who wouldn’t be eating out of her hand.

  By the time I got outside, Maybell had reached the passenger side of Marguerite’s truck. Marguerite could always handle her beer and was the designated driver.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” I said to Maybell. The question was rhetorical. They were off to her favorite bar.

  She turned back to me. “You’re gonna make a fine mother one day.”

  “You sure didn’t!”

  Marguerite rolled down her window and called: “Hey, Belutha!”

  I had nothing against Marguerite, but she was enabling my mom and you can’t reward that kind of behavior.

  I pointed my finger. “I want her back by eleven!”

  Maybell got in, and I heard the two of them giggling like teenagers.

  Marguerite put the truck in reverse and Maybell rolled down the window. “Don’t wait up! That’s an order!”

  The truck pivoted over the desert gravel and took off with a roar.

  About an hour later, Sonny Boy sugar-crashed and crawled off to bed without brushing his teeth. I used to be on him about that, but lately I figured he was old enough to face the consequences of his own failures. He was thirteen and spent all his non–school time playing video games or eating food, usually at the same time. That left him about twenty pounds overweight and completely antisocial. He wasn’t a bad guy. It’s just that living in that house had turned him in on himself, and it was hard to know if he was ever going to come out.

  I had put Clover down around nine o’clock, but like clockwork he woke up at eleven-thirty, crying for a feeding. Even when Maybell was home, it was usually me who mixed the formula and gave Clover the bottle. Actual breast milk was out of the question, of course. Those globes hanging from Maybell’s chest had no domestic utility. For someone who had no qualms about reproducing, Maybell possessed a complete lack of any maternal instinct.

  With Clover out again and Sonny Boy asleep, and with Maybell off to the ruin of all, the place was finally quiet. It was the only time that I felt I belonged there. I held my tea and had an open schoolbook on my lap. But I wasn’t reading it. The quiet was too precious and had to be savored.

  Maybell’s house was actually a trailer with another half-trailer added to it, because that’s how Maybell lived—putting things together that didn’t belong. Like me and Sonny Boy. Two kids with different fathers: both assholes. And Clover, her latest mistake—another father and, I have to think, probably another asshole. None of us knew who the guy was. Some trucker on a long haul passing through, we figured.

  Clover was eight months old now. When Maybell was pregnant with him, she made it clear that, since she’d be working full-time at the diner, the burden of caring for this new baby was going to fall on me. I became determined that I would hate that thing growing inside her. But on the day Clover was born, I held him in my arms and he melted me. He was one hundred percent innocent of any crime committed by our mother. I decided then that he should be kept carefree and unburdened by the family he was born into for as long as possible.

  The problem was that I pretty much had to raise him, more than I had done with Sonny Boy. Maybell was off to the diner at five-thirty, so every morning I would wake up with Clover, change him, feed him, burp him, dress him, then dro
p him off at the diner before going to school. Sometimes I’d pick him up on the way home. If not, I’d usually hit the P&Q and load up on supplies for him and the rest of us. Of course I’d babysit at night while Maybell went out looking to hook up with another guy and start that tragic cycle all over again.

  All that would end soon, at least for me. This was the year I’d be graduating high school. I’d be gone from that house and that town and that mother. I’d be gone and I’d never look back.

  When I stepped outside, I saw tonight’s Jerkoff slurping at Maybell like she was a happy hour drink. He was younger than her by about fifteen years, pretty trim, with a full head of close-cropped hair. I’d tell you that Maybell liked them young, but that wasn’t true. She liked them breathing.

  Jerkoff would have done Maybell right on the side of the truck. Standing, lying down, the problem of gravity was of no concern to a man’s lizard brain. But Maybell preferred the ceremony of a bed and motioned toward the house. That’s when Jerkoff turned and saw me standing in the doorway.

  “Who’s this,” he asked. “Yer little girl?”

  Maybell leaned back against the truck for support. “Oh, Lord. Belutha, honey, this is . . .” She tried to remember Jerkoff’s name.

  “Henry,” Jerkoff said. He sauntered up to me like he was still on the hunt in a bar. “Belutha, huh? That’s a pretty name. Pretty name for a pretty girl.”

  Maybell shook her head. “Oh, my—” She knew where this was going.

  “You and your mom, you like ta do everything together?” Jerkoff gave me a leer in case there was some chance I didn’t know he meant sex.

  I have to say that was a low, even for a jerkoff. He was leaning so close I could smell the bar on his breath and clothes. I didn’t think through what happened next. My body acted on its own. I was very proud of it.

  I threw the cold tea in his face and suddenly shouted: “HOT COFFEE!”

  Jerkoff screamed and fell back about ten feet. In fairness, I suppose the power of suggestion works marvels on a drunken mind, and the sensation of cold can sometimes seem hot.

  “Daaaaaaam! Fuuuuuuck!!” He touched his face and realized it wasn’t burned. “What the fuck?! Is your bitch daughter crazy?!”

  Now I was back on plan. I lifted my rifle.

  “Shh! Ya hear that? Coyote!” I fired and hit the ground about two feet from Jerkoff.

  “Jesus Christ!” he yelled.

  I pretended I heard something else. “Look, there’s another one.” This time I hit a rock between his legs.

  “Jesus, Maybell! Jesus!” Jerkoff ran to his truck.

  “Don’t you come around here no more, mister!” I yelled at him. “We got enough babies in this house.”

  His truck peeled out. Maybell was wobbly without something to lean against. I put my arm around her waist to lead her inside.

  “Let’s get you to bed, Maybell.”

  “That’s the right line,” she said, stumbling next to me. “But you’re the wrong guy.”

  Hadley was less of a town and more a placeholder where someone eventually intended a town to be. It was located in an empty corner of Arizona, a place you didn’t want to live if you had a choice of living anywhere else. There was a post office, a police station, some banks, a couple of churches, a sad excuse for a public school, and one main street with a few pointless stores. Maybell’s Diner was the only place to get yourself a meal, if you didn’t count the mini-mart at the Chevron station. Most of us didn’t.

  The nearest town with anything worthwhile was Gaylordville. They had a mall and also a grocery store called the P&Q, where you might find an actual vegetable if you went on the right day.

  A bus connected the two towns. It was the same bus that came out from Phoenix. Hadley was the last stop on the line, and I like to think that whoever decided on that understood where I lived. It was the last place you wanted to be.

  It was that bus that brought Bill to our town. How that happened, I’ll get into soon. Right now, this is about what happened when he got off the bus.

  Maybell was having a typical day at the diner. I should probably tell you that while Maybell hadn’t quite reached her expiration date, she was definitely beyond her use-by date. By that I mean she was well past the age most women have settled down with a man who’s legally bound to not give a shit how they wind up looking. Still, Maybell remained what most guys consider luscious. She was tall and striking, with movie star cheekbones. Even rounding forty, her blue eyes could freeze a man to his seat. The desert sun hadn’t been terribly kind to her skin, but it hadn’t been altogether mean. And no matter what outfit she wore, her boobs spilled forth this way and that, a quality that never seemed to lose its allure. That spillage didn’t happen by accident. Maybell positioned her breasts for maximum impact. They swung like a watch on a chain, hypnotizing any man who came within range. If it were up to me, I’d have covered them with something permanent, like plywood or sheet metal. This way they couldn’t cause any more damage.

  Maybell had always been able to get any guy in Hadley. The problem was, nothing ever took. I was okay with that. The selection in town was pretty grim.

  That day, the day Bill arrived, my mom was serving up eggs and complaints.

  “Dammit, that daughter ’a mine,” she yelled to Dolene, across the diner. “She’s like walking birth control. Does she think I’m trying to have babies? Scuse me, Darlin.” Maybell gave Clover’s bubble walker a little kick, sending it between tables 4 and 6 so she could get by and dump a load of dishes behind the counter.

  Dolene was homegrown, like the tumbleweed, with eyes like a golden retriever that never quite looked at you directly. She was smart enough to add up a check, but you could tell she was never getting out of Hadley. “I take it you didn’t get laid last night.”

  Maybell pointed to her sour puss. “Does this say ‘laid’ to you?”

  There was a “harrumph” from booth 5 by the window. That was Rose. Rose was an old woman by the time she was thirty. Now she was in her late sixties, a widow since before I was born—in other words, forever. She liked to spend her afternoons at Maybell’s Diner, reading her book and keeping an eye on the goings on around her, as if she was the town’s homeroom teacher.

  “Look at Saint Rose,” Maybell said, stuffing dirty plates into the plastic tub under the counter. “Thinks she smells better than Mentos. I ain’t running a library here, Rose. Next time bring Reader’s Digest!”

  There was another sound from Rose, something between a “well” and a “pfffft.” She never took her eyes off her book.

  The door opened with a ding! from the bell that hung on it. No one noticed Bill entering. He was about average in height, but his skinny frame made him look taller. You could tell from his face that he was in his mid-twenties, but those were hard years he had lived, and his body looked frail and geriatric. His clothes were old and clung to him like an extra layer of skin, with a smell that would never wash out.

  The angles of his face were sharp and careworn. But his eyes, those were different. His face was hard and weathered, but his eyes were soft. They seemed brand new.

  No one in the diner even looked. If they did they would have seen those eyes taking in every little detail: the people talking, forks carrying food, the string lights behind the counter, Dolene ringing up a check. But what drew Bill more than anything else was the grill. Harley, the grill cook, must have had four meals going at once, each with its own set of sounds and smells. Most of those meals involved eggs. His spatula made a metal-on-metal scrape as he turned them. Bill was riveted. He went to sit at the counter to watch.

  Down the counter, a porkish-looking man named Earle—probably one of three men in town who had never slept with my mom—raised his empty cup. “Can I get a refill, Maybell?”

  Maybell stopped and faced him. “Seriously, Earle? Is it so goddam much trouble for you to get up off your ass and get it yourself? Can’t you see I’m working here?”

  “Well . . .” he stammered. “I just—was I—I was—”

  Maybell pointed to the coffee pot. “How far away is that? Two feet?”