The girl keeps tormenting me with this pic. “Marked Man,”
she says. Said she was checking me for fleas ‘cause dogs.
Heidi brought me a mysterious envelope delivered to the P.O. box nobody knew but she and me and the handful of old ones I trusted.
I opened it. Inside were a few pages of manuscript, typed, quite old, and I was pissed. Who can get through to me at this point? Upsetting.
Here’s the excerpt that made my armhairs tingle:
************
After what I had heard about Gypsy and the New York graffiti and all that about the Shuteye Train, I had a kind of meltdown. I went back to my apartment and fizzed through a handful of wants. I wanted to load Janet and Jimmy in the car and just leave town forever. I wanted to have a splashy scene like the one in Citizen Kane, where Orson Welles smashed everything to pieces, meaning I wanted to obliterate all my cameras and lenses and framed Anselm prints all over the empty floors of my lifeless living space. I wanted to call Al and apologize for having pretended to be a private detective and on a case. There was no case, or if there was it was so far out of my league the best I could do with it was probably get someone killed. The worst I could do was try to find a wry guy named Frelinger who had done more in pursuit of fantasy than I could do in the likely event that his fantasy had gotten him killed. I wanted out of a story I had no business being in.
So, as usual, I settled for the thing I wanted least of all. I got in my car — just to get the hell out of my apartment — and went for a drive outside Bellerton onto the back roads. Where no streetlights were and trees crowded the roads like the unremembered memories of Gypsy, glowering and heavy as lost youth.
I drove for hours, it seemed like, because every stop street in the dark was better than going back to all the mess I didn’t want to deal with. Stop, start, drive, still not going home.
When I saw it on the shoulder of the road I thought “Oh no, not this.” An old, a very old, pickup truck with a flat tire and a middle-aged guy wrestling with a spare that was obviously also flat. What caught my headlights was him, a lean, leathery sort in khakis twirling a cross-model lug wrench in his fingers, like some cheerleader in a baton competition. For an instant, kind of like a flashing star, then done and invisible again. Couldn’t tell if he was blonde or gray, just that the headlights picked that out too, and I pulled over. It was the twirling I recognized, the frustration of a man who knew what to do but couldn’t because he’d been so damn stupid in the first place.
I stopped my car, turned off the engine, and approached him with my flashlight so I could see him better and he me not at all.
“Need a hand?” I asked, bluffly friendly, and he turned indifferent eyes on me.
“Doubt if you have a spare on you for a 1953 Chevy pickup,” he said, not unfriendly, but pointedly.
He was still holding the lug wrench, guessing me up and down the same way I was examining him up and down. I thought for a few seconds as we regarded one another in different lights. I was definitely ten to fifteen years younger, had him by a good three inches in height and about thirty pounds. He had light blue or gray eyes, it was hard to tell, and even closer, it was impossible to tell if the hair was blond, gray or white. He was wearing old canvas sneakers that looked like worn out basketball high tops.
I stopped a couple feet short, level with the rear taillights of the pickup.
I told him, “I’ll put the flashlight on the edge of the bed, where you can see the both of us, if you’ll put that wrench in the bed. We can talk about a lift.”
He tossed the wrench into the metal bed of the pickup with a clang and extended his skinny arms outwards. I took his words as bravado. “No need for flashlight sharing. I could see you just fine already.”
“My name’s Bill,” I said. “I’m Johnny,” he replied. We didn’t shake hands, just that imperceptible nod guys use when they are not friends but not planning a fight.
In a moment he was in the car. I told him I didn’t know where we were, so he’d have to tell me where the nearest service station was.
“Just a piece down the road,” he said. “Not many places open at this hour.”
We talked — a little bit. He told me he was a mechanic and made a joke about the cobbler’s children having no shoes. I told him I was in law enforcement but not on duty, just driving to clear my mind.
“Know the feeling,” he said. “Just around the next corner’s a place you can drop me off. You can get back to your thoughts in a minute. Or two. I can give you a map to find your way home.”
It was as he had promised around the corner, an old ramshackle country gas station with the light out on the overhead marquee and a flickering fluorescent light inside glinting on a cash register and a few wire stacks containing snack food. I eyed the marquee as he unlocked the front door and I read the faded painted sign “Johnny’s Last Chance Garage” above the entrance.
“Come on in,” he said. “My place. I do have a map for you. And a drink if you’ll accept that in payment. In lieu of cash I don’t have. Which I apologize for.”
I spread my hands in the universal show of no thanks, I’m fine. He laughed.
“Be my guest,” he said. “But allow me to point out that you’ve been clearing your head for quite a few miles, and you are very lost if you wound up a mile or two from here. You are deep in the pine barrens, and I can show you how to get back to where you need to go, if you really do want to get back home. The offer of a drink isn’t necessary. Just something for you to do while I search my map pile. The least I can do. You stood up to help a stranger in the middle of the night. Not many people have that in them. Why I already know a lot about you.”
This I had to hear. “What kind of drink? And what is it you think you know?”
Johnny laughed. ‘Will Mr. Jack do?”
He poured. I sipped and indeed he did have maps in a pile, dusty as hell. He started sifting through them, reached for the Jack bottle himself and took a swig, the first proof I’d had he was not a ghost or a spirit or a demon sent to end my terrible night — and week.
“What is it you think you know about me?” I asked, maybe a bit brusquely.
“You’re lost in the middle of the night in country far but not very far from where you live you’ve never been to, and you’re just now realizing you don’t where you are or where you’re supposed to be. Want to tell me about it? Of course you do. Strangers on a journey can’t help themselves in situations like this. You can spill it all to someone you’ll never see again. So spill. Could you pass me the Jack?”
I stared at him, hard. I’d heard of a guy, somebody Frelinger had claimed he knew. From the Barrens. “What’s your name?” I asked.
“Told you already. Johnny.”
“Johnny Dodge, right?”
“People call me that sometimes, but only once upon a time.”
“You want me to spill everything, don’t you?,” I hissed. “Tell you about the dog Jimmy, and Janet, a photo of a painting of a goddess called Alice Hate, and a con artist named Frank Frelinger, and my cop pal Al who got the shit scared out of him by a phantom in New York, and the old orderly named George, and Feds with guns, and a dwarf named Gypsy, and the mere whisper of a name of The Shuteye Train, and an impossibly invincible warrior named Johnny Dodge who was called the “Fast Finisher” and “The Snake” in the hell of South Street almost a decade ago? You want me to share all my fears and self-doubts about what I’ve landed myself in, and where all this might lead, and its remote connection to reality, and then you want to tell me what it is I’m supposed to do to fulfill your wishes no matter what happens to me or Janet?”
“No,” he said, handing me a dusty three-county map of South Jersey. “I want you to finish your drink, get back in your car, and go back home to your job.”
Which is exactly what I did, my mind insisting the next morning that it was all a drunken dream on the couch in my apartment. Except I could still see the eyes when I’d dared to utter the name Alice Hate.
**********
Heidi was glowering at me. I told her it was country spam. She said, “You know this man. Who is he?”
I told her. “I know him. His name is Traylor. We hunted together once. I know the book it comes from. It was never finished. This is a hoax.”
She drew herself all up, like she was going to whup me. “Time for the truth,” she said. “And nothing but.”
