Somehow Tom produced a newspaper, cobbling it together out of wire stories, press releases, and a couple of soft features he had prepared in advance that were held in the can to fill last-minute holes, and got it out and on the racks only a day late. And then the depression hit, as he might have expected it to, coming off meth and after having joined the fraternity of killers. Was it a product of guilt or just fear that Mark Brubaker’s body would be discovered and he’d be called upon to report in the pages of his newspaper the details of a death he himself had caused? He was in possession of knowledge he could not share with anyone, but even if there were someone to tell, what would they make of his fantastic story, starting with his rash motive in trespassing on Brubaker’s property to begin with? Would anyone believe he had killed the tweaker in self-defense? With hindsight, if Tom seriously thought he might be confronting Ray Walker’s murderer, then what did he expect?
Is that why had Brubaker attacked him? Because he was Ray’s killer and thought Tom was onto him? Not likely, Tom thought, because Brubaker’s reaction to him seemed entirely impulsive. As the saying went, even paranoids have enemies, and while Brubaker had seemed uninterested in Ray Walker and even in the whereabouts of Anya, he clearly had something to fear from Albert DeRichter.
Or maybe not. Brubaker could have conjured the entire grievance out of thin air, just as Tom, in his own meth stupor, envisioned himself as Whispering Jim, amputating his own arm. That hallucination had an immediacy and degree of detail Tom had never experienced in a mere dream. If he weren’t so fundamentally rational, he’d interpret it as a paranormal communication from the beyond, a desperate plea for justice from the restless spirit of Jim himself. But since he was rational, he gave it a different interpretation: it was his subconscious mind egging him on in his pursuit of the truth, now an urgent personal necessity following his encounter with Mark Brubaker. It didn’t take a Freudian to see the amputation as a symbol for castration, or, more precisely, the very emasculation at the hands of Mark Brubaker that Tom had only narrowly escaped, the lingering emasculation of his failed career in big-time journalism, and the ongoing emasculation of being systematically thwarted in his pursuit of the story, for although he was reduced to publishing a small-town paper, he still had the instincts of a reporter.
Tom thought about reporting the Brubaker incident to the authorities, but the skeptical interrogation he’d receive from Sheriff Martin was all-too-easy to imagine.
“You say he made you get nekkid?” Tom would be asked. “Now, why do you suppose he would do a thing like that? You saying he was a fag?”
The sheriff was privy to all sorts of distastefulness, but nothing more disgusting than this: obviously, a kinky homosexual tryst fueled by meth and ending in murder, an unsavory queer lovers’ spat. While Brubaker was dead and therefore inarguably on the receiving end of a violent act, Tom would be able to provide no evidence that he’d been attacked first, other than his own testimony.
“Say again?” the sheriff would probe, tirelessly and uncomprehendingly: “What exactly is it that were you doing at Brubaker’s shack in the first place?”
The likelihood of a just outcome was so remote that Tom understood why rape victims so rarely bother to report the crime. From his perspective as a victim, albeit one who successfully defended himself, he could see that an investigation by the Slickrock County sheriff would serve no good purpose. Reports of rape virtually never turned up in the Forum police blotter, but did that mean that there weren’t sexual assaults on the West End? That seemed entirely improbable, indeed impossible considering how rough life was by every other measure. Therefore, no doubt wisely, such unpleasantries were swept under the rug.
Yet at the same time, Tom now felt driven, where before he was only curious, to keep searching for the truth. Sarah Walker had been right in warning Tom that to investigate her husband’s disappearance could be dangerous. But dangerous how? She couldn’t possibly have anticipated that Tom would be attacked by Mark Brubaker. That was far too random an event to have been predicted, unless she only meant to express the ethos of the place and caution him against prying into any dark corners of the West End. He doubted that was what she intended, but it would have been a reasonable warning. Shine a light in a place that had been purposefully left dark and you might startle a rattlesnake, stumble on a toxic meth lab, or discover a moldering corpse.
So what was Sarah alluding to? What other hidden dangers lurked?
Whatever she meant by it, she owed him an explanation. Tom was exhausted and jittery, and felt as though a week’s uninterrupted sleep wouldn’t be enough for his recovery from the events of the previous few days. But he couldn’t sleep. It was early evening, and he knew Sarah would be home from work, so he jumped in his car and drove to her house.
Ray Jr. was outside shooting hoops in the fading light when Tom pulled up and got out of his car.
Thump. Thump. Thump. Pling.
Tom grabbed the ball as it caromed off the rim.
“Hi Ray,” he said. “Is your mom here?”
Ray nodded and Tom tossed the ball back. For Ray, it was easy to mask his disappointment that Tom wasn’t interested in playing with him, even to take just a few shots: Thump. Thump. Swoosh.
“What happened to you?” Sarah asked, when she opened the door. She was wearing an apron dusted with flower.
“A lot,” he said.
Though they had been together just a few days earlier at The Uranium Drive-In, so much had happened to Tom since then that it felt to him as if it had been months or years since he’d last seen her. He recognized that she couldn’t have the same perspective – that she hadn’t aged in the previous 36 hours, even if he had – and that his unannounced appearance on her doorstep might strike her as overly aggressive and might even be unwelcome. He was suddenly and acutely aware that more than information he needed her sympathy, or maybe just the warmth of her kitchen, but that he had no right to either one. They scarcely knew each other. She was a married woman whose husband was missing but not necessarily dead. But he had been on an emotional journey that she was at the center of; she had, in fact, sent him down the fateful path that took him first to Albuquerque and Anya and then to his devastating encounter with Brubaker. Maybe, given her consequential role, he was entitled after all.
“Do I look that bad?” he asked.
“I was just making pies,” she said. “Would you like a slice? It’s still warm. It’s peach.”
He nodded. She did not seem surprised or particularly pleased to see him but somehow resigned, as if his visit was inevitable, sooner or later, or something to be routinely expected. He was either that persistent or had become a fixture in her life. She poured him a cup of coffee.
“Ray isn’t with Anya,” Tom said.
“I knew that.”
“You seem to know a lot. More than you tell.”
“How’s the pie?”
“So good…” he smiled.
“I guess you found her….”
“Anya’s in Albuquerque. I went there to talk to her. She’s convinced that Mark Brubaker killed Ray.”
“I don’t know,” Sarah said tentatively. “It’s possible, I guess.”
“Is that why you told me it was dangerous to ask questions? Because of Brubaker? Were you concerned about me?”
“Let me ask you something,” she countered. “Why do you care so much about what happened to Ray? An auto mechanic disappears and the only people it hurts are his wife and kids and nobody else. You didn’t even know him all that well. Everybody else just wants to forget as quickly as they can. Why can’t you leave it alone?”
“I don’t know. I’ve become involved, I guess.”
“Involved how?”
It was a good question with an obvious answer, but he couldn’t say it. The killing of Brubaker had made him an integral part of the story, robbing him of any claim to detachment, journalistic or any other kind. He wanted to confess and tell her about his horrifying encounter with the fat, tattooed tweaker. He wanted to be absolved by her, as if that were possible, but her reaction might not be that simple and he couldn’t afford to take the risk.
Thump. Thump. Swoosh.
“How are your kids doing?” he asked.
“All right. Angie’s still working up in Telluride. Ray Jr., well, you saw him. He acts like a normal 13-year-old, doesn’t he?”
“I didn’t know there was a normal 13-year old.”
She smiled ruefully. “I could have been normal.”
He ignored the chance to follow-up and get more personal, which in other circumstances would have been of interest but was, at this moment, a distraction from more pressing matters.
“I need to know why you said it could be dangerous for me to ask questions about Ray.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t say.”
“You don’t know or you can’t say?”
“I don’t know.”
“How can I help you if you won’t tell me the truth?”
“I never asked for your help,” she replied a little sharply. “I don’t need your help and I don’t want your help. Especially not if you’re going to keep acting like I’m a liar.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just wish you’d tell me why you think it’s dangerous.”
“It’s just time to stop,” she said without conviction. “Nothing good can come of it, no matter what happened to Ray. That’s how people survive here. It’s what we do and we’re good at it. We accept whatever happens and then we move on.”
“Does it involve the DeRichters?”
“Everything on the West End involves the DeRichters,” she sighed. “Nobody likes having somebody snooping around, asking questions about them, especially the DeRichters. They probably know you went to see Elizabeth in Cortez. You ask a lot of questions, you know. Too many, probably.”
“If nobody asks questions, you’ll never know what happened to Ray.”
“Maybe that’s just as well,” she said. “That’s why I decided today that when I got home from work I’d make pies instead of worrying. I’ve done enough worrying and it hasn’t helped one bit.”
“I can understand that,” he said. “At least you can eat the pies and they taste good.”
At an impasse, they didn’t talk much more, but he made no move to leave and she allowed him to feel at home. He lay down on her sofa while she cleaned up the kitchen.