* * *
Agatha Burns droned. CD prices were supposed to come down after the technology was paid for. But they were higher than they were at the beginning. What was up with that? She could download music off the Internet to save money but the Internet, Connie had told her, was an evil plot by the government. Who knew what subliminal messages were hidden in there, like, flashing into your brain before your eyes even registered it? Hey, look, she said, there’s a sequential licence number on that van. You think the guy asked for it or it was random? Random was weird. There was no … well, random to it. Well, there was, she thought, in a random way, if Harv got her meaning.
She was deathly afraid, Harv suddenly realized. She’d figured it out. He made sure her seatbelt stayed fastened. The chatter was beyond crank patter. She probably hadn’t been out of the apartment in months, waiting for pills to be dropped in the stairwell, waiting for the Captain to come by and pirate her ass, piping himself aboard.
At the hook north of Stateline he stayed on the Interstate, easing into the slow lane to catch the ramp off to the badlands while he thought. He’d done stupid things but he wasn’t stupid. He’d acted without heart, but he had heart. The Captain was a manipulator, but that didn’t matter: Harv had more money than he’d ever earned either legitimately or in the life. That was the name of the game: to make out, to collect your end. But the Captain didn’t seem to care. The family money had been there for generations before he was born, the golden road was paved for him. All he had to do was follow his ancestor’s footprints. It was impossible for the Captain to be so stupid he’d ever be broke. There was just too much money.
“You know,” Agatha Burns said, “when you look at a tree like that tree over there, that there’s actually more of the tree underground, roots and stuff, than we see. Harv, you ever think about that? What we see and what we don’t see. I mean, sure, if we don’t see it, it probably isn’t actually real for us, but there’s a lot more to the tree than the … well, the tree. Weird, eh?”
One night, when Harv and the Captain got drunk and high, the real Cookie got loose. “You should’ve seen her when she was in high school,” he’d said as they sat in their underwear in a hotel room overlooking Michigan, watching Agatha Burns go through jerky cheerleader moves, trying to please them, her eyes on the little baggie of crank on the coffee table. “Perfect. Absolute fucking perfection. Perfect boobs. An ass that was on ball bearings. Legs up to here. She’d have her pals over and they’d go in the backyard of her house and do their routines. Fucking amazing, Harv. I watched from my house, the six of them, little skirts, pretending they didn’t know their boyfriends were watching over the fence. All perfect.” He called over the music. “Right, Ag? You and the team?”
She nodded, breathless, a plastic smile on her face, not missing a beat. “Yes, Connie. We were hot.”
“Did you know I was watching? From my window, Ag?”
She nodded again. “Yes, Connie. It turned us on.”
“Looks don’t mean for shit, though, right, Ag?”
Her breath was short. “Right, Connie. I was superficial then, but I’m okay now.”
“Take off the top, show Harv how they bounce.” He’d turned to Harv. “Watch this. Elastic.”
Harv had been uncomfortable. There was a sick aspect to the Captain’s jowly, pinched face, a hatred he couldn’t imagine, even on his own face when he had to do the hard things. He felt a stirring of feeling for her, for her open face and her fading beauty. “It’s okay, Cookie. I seen boobs before.”
“Yeah, but not like this. C’mon, Ag, give us the old one-two-three-four. Swing ’em.”
The night had ground on. At one point Agatha Burns blew them both, but Harv had been too far gone to remember it afterwards, if it was good or not.
He did remember the Captain, twirling a little baggie of crank, had enticed her to lick away at the scar tissue on the side of Harv’s face and suck at his destroyed fingers, tell him she loved him, his scars were beautiful.
Harv did remember that.
And he remembered walking into the bedroom of the suite at dawn, looking for his jacket, and she was almost invisible under the pounding blubber of the howling Captain, her face stuffed into a pillow, her screams muffled, the Captain looking up with blood running down his chin under his huge wreath of smiling jowls.
* * *
Phil Harvey checked the odometer and slowed, looking for the sideroad that would take him away from the feeder highway to one of the mom-and-pop labs scattered in the area. Beside him, Agatha Burns’s knees were white and knocking. She was talking to the passenger window. The scarf had looped away and he glanced at her, could see she was still leaking blood from the punctures at the nape of her neck. She was essaying a soliloquy on alternative cultures, telling how she’d got an A-plus in high school for paralleling 1960s America with 1930s Berlin.
He found the sideroad and sped the Camaro absolutely straight for several miles, into the heart of the badlands, passing only scattered farms, a few shacks, and remote houses with yellow geometric windows lit in the distance. A cloud of Riders on noisy bikes flashed past him. In his rear-view he could see on their backs the smudged oval colours of the club. He slowed until they’d vanished, then turned onto a rough track, mindful of the washboards and dips, worrying for the undercarriage of the car.
In the middle of a speed revelation about the temperature at the core of the Earth, she turned to him. “Harv? Harv?”
“Nearly there, Ag. Relax.”
“You know, I was beautiful, once. I was perfect. It wasn’t my fault, how I was. Tell Connie, okay? It wasn’t my fault.”
“Just a little further.” He didn’t look at her. “Few minutes.”
He felt sad that she knew. Unless someone had fucked you up wickedly, this wasn’t the way to do it. If they were wicked rats you had to make them go hard. But if it was just housekeeping, you were jocular and a pal, lolling them off to sleep until you dropped them as though you flicked off a light switch. There was enough old pain in life without making new stuff.
Her knees were knocking audibly, a mile a minute. Her fingers twisted into one tight fist between the tops of her thighs. “Is it gonna hurt, Harv? Can you do it, fast, without hurting me?”
“Don’t get paranoid, Ag. It’s just the stuff making you think crazy.”
He flashed his headlights three times, then once, eased off the rough track and stopped. A rangy woman in an oilskin with a shotgun under her arm appeared in front of the Camaro, squinting through the windshield. The woman was in her sixties, her dead hair balding back from the front. She flashed a half-a-smile of broken, gapped teeth. She had angry sores around her mouth. Behind her was the lab, a sagging pickup truck with a weathered, peeling camper mounted in the back, the windows cranked open.
From the corner of his eye he saw Agatha Burns’s hands unlock from each other. Ghostly, one of her palms moved in the air between them. He glanced. Her knees had stopped jittering. She was looking directly at him. He felt his curtain of hair being gently moved back from his face, then the freezing of the palm of her flesh against his face, against his scars, stroking.
“I’m sorry, Harv. What he made me do, here —” her fingers traced the mass of ridges and angry boiled skin, “— that night at the hotel was the worst thing I ever did. To anybody. I’m sorry.” She inhaled with a sob, then calmed down and composed herself. “I don’t want to die without you knowing I’m ashamed.”
Chapter 6