11
The following morning, Freddi Linklatter is sitting on the edge of the loading dock and smoking a Marlboro. Her Discount Electronix jacket is folded neatly beside her with her DE gimme cap placed on top of it. She’s talking about some Jesus-jumper who gave her hassle. People are always giving her hassle, and she tells Brady all about it on break. She gives him chapter and verse, because Brady is a good listener.
“So he says to me, he goes, All homosexuals are going to hell, and this tract explains all about it. So I take it, right? There’s a picture on the front of these two narrow-ass gay guys—in leisure suits, I swear to God—holding hands and staring into a cave filled with flames. Plus the devil! With a pitchfork! I am not shitting you. Still, I try to discuss it with him. I’m under the impression that he wants to have a dialogue. So I say, I go, You ought to get your face out of the Book of LaBitticus or whatever it is long enough to read a few scientific studies. Gays are born gay, I mean, hello? He goes, That is simply not true. Homosexuality is learned behavior and can be unlearned. So I can’t believe it, right? I mean, you have got to be shitting me. But I don’t say that. What I say is, Look at me, dude, take a real good look. Don’t be shy, go top to bottom. What do you see? And before he can toss some more of his bullshit, I go, You see a guy, is what you see. Only God got distracted before he could slap a dick on me and went on to the next in line. So then he goes . . .”
Brady sticks with her—more or less—until Freddi gets to the Book of LaBitticus (she means Leviticus, but Brady doesn’t care enough to correct her), and then mostly loses her, keeping track just enough to throw in the occasional uh-huh. He doesn’t really mind the monologue. It’s soothing, like the LCD Soundsystem he sometimes listens to on his iPod when he goes to sleep. Freddi Linklatter is way tall for a girl, at six-two or -three she towers over Brady, and what she’s saying is true: she looks like a girl about as much as Brady Hartsfield looks like Vin Diesel. She’s togged out in straight-leg 501s, motorcycle skids, and a plain white tee that hangs dead straight, without even a touch of tits. Her dark blond hair is butched to a quarter inch. She wears no earrings and no makeup. She probably thinks Max Factor is a statement about what some guy did to some girl out behind old Dad’s barn.
He says yeah and uh-huh and right, all the time wondering what the old cop made of his letter, and if the old cop will try to get in touch at the Blue Umbrella. He knows that sending the letter was a risk, but not a very big one. He made up a prose style that’s completely different from his own. The chances of the old cop picking up anything useful from the letter are slim to nonexistent.
Debbie’s Blue Umbrella is a slightly bigger risk, but if the old cop thinks he can trace him down that way, he’s in for a big surprise. Debbie’s servers are in Eastern Europe, and in Eastern Europe computer privacy is like cleanliness in America: next to godliness.
“So he goes, I swear this is true, he goes, There are plenty of young Christian women in our church who could show you how to fix yourself up, and if you grew your hair out, you’d look quite pretty. Do you believe it? So I tell him, With a little lipum-stickum, you’d look darn pretty yourself. Put on a leather jacket and a dog collar and you might luck into a hot date at the Corral. Get your first squirt on the Tower of Power. So that buzzes him bigtime and he goes, If you’re going to get personal about this . . .”
Anyway, if the old cop wants to follow the computer trail, he’ll have to turn the letter over to the cops in the technical section, and Brady doesn’t think he’ll do that. Not right away, at least. He’s got to be bored sitting there with nothing but the TV for company. And the revolver, of course, the one he keeps beside him with his beer and magazines. Can’t forget the revolver. Brady has never seen him actually stick it in his mouth, but several times he’s seen him holding it. Shiny happy people don’t hold guns in their laps that way.
“So I tell him, I go, Don’t get mad. Somebody pushes back against your precious ideas, you guys always get mad. Have you noticed that about the Christers?”
He hasn’t but says he has.
“Only this one listened. He actually did. And we ended up going down to Hosseni’s Bakery and having coffee. Where, I know this is hard to believe, we actually did have something approaching a dialogue. I don’t hold out much hope for the human race, but every now and then . . .”
Brady is pretty sure his letter will pep the old cop up, at least to start with. He didn’t get all those citations for being stupid, and he’ll see right through the veiled suggestion that he commit suicide the way Mrs. Trelawney did. Veiled? Not very. It’s pretty much right out front. Brady believes the old cop will go all gung ho, at least for awhile. But when he fails to get anywhere, it will make the fall even more jarring. Then, assuming the old cop takes the Blue Umbrella bait, Brady can really go to work.
The old cop is thinking, If I can get you talking, I can goad you.
Only Brady is betting the old cop never read Nietzsche; Brady’s betting the old cop is more of a John Grisham man. If he reads at all. When you gaze into the abyss, Nietzsche wrote, the abyss also gazes into you.
I am the abyss, old boy. Me.
The old cop is certainly a bigger challenge than poor guilt-ridden Olivia Trelawney . . . but getting to her was such a hot hit to the nervous system that Brady can’t help wanting to try it again. In some ways prodding Sweet Livvy into high-siding it was a bigger thrill than cutting a bloody swath through that pack of job-hunting a*sholes at City Center. Because it took brains. It took dedication. It took planning. And a little bit of help from the cops didn’t hurt, either. Did they guess their faulty deductions were partly to blame for Sweet Livvy’s suicide? Probably not Huntley, such a possibility would never cross his plodder’s mind. Ah, but Hodges. He might have his doubts. A few little mice nibbling at the wires back there in his smart-cop brain. Brady hopes so. If not, he may get a chance to tell him. On the Blue Umbrella.
Mostly, though, it was him. Brady Hartsfield. Credit where credit is due. City Center was a sledgehammer. On Olivia Trelawney, he used a scalpel.
“Are you listening to me?” Freddi asks.
He smiles. “Guess I drifted away there for a minute.”
Never tell a lie when you can tell the truth. The truth isn’t always the safest course, but mostly it is. He wonders idly what she’d say if he told her, Freddi, I am the Mercedes Killer. Or if he said, Freddi, there are nine pounds of homemade plastic explosive in my basement closet.
She is looking at him as if she can read these thoughts, and Brady has a moment of unease. Then she says, “It’s working two jobs, pal. That’ll wear you down.”
“Yes, but I’d like to get back to college, and nobody’s going to pay for it but me. Also there’s my mother.”
“The wino.”
He smiles. “My mother is actually more of a vodka-o.”
“Invite me over,” Freddi says grimly. “I’ll drag her to a f*cking AA meeting.”
“Wouldn’t work. You know what Dorothy Parker said, right? You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.”
Freddi considers this for a moment, then throws back her head and voices a Marlboro-raspy laugh. “I don’t know who Dorothy Parker is, but I’m gonna save that one.” She sobers. “Seriously, why don’t you just ask Frobisher for more hours? That other job of yours is strictly rinky-dink.”
“I’ll tell you why he doesn’t ask Frobisher for more hours,” Frobisher says, stepping out onto the loading platform. Anthony Frobisher is young and geekily bespectacled. In this he is like most of the Discount Electronix employees. Brady is also young, but better-looking than Tones Frobisher. Not that this makes him handsome. Which is okay. Brady is willing to settle for nondescript.
“Lay it on us,” Freddi says, and mashes her cigarette out. Across the loading zone behind the big-box store, which anchors the south end of the Birch Hill Mall, are the employees’ cars (mostly old beaters) and three VW Beetles painted bright green. These are always kept spotless, and late-spring sun twinkles on their windshields. On the sides, in blue, is COMPUTER PROBLEMS? CALL THE DISCOUNT ELECTRONIX CYBER PATROL!
“Circuit City is gone and Best Buy is tottering,” Frobisher says in a schoolteacherly voice. “Discount Electronix is also tottering, along with several other businesses that are on life support thanks to the computer revolution: newspapers, book publishers, record stores, and the United States Postal Service. Just to mention a few.”
“Record stores?” Freddi asks, lighting another cigarette. “What are record stores?”
“That’s a real gut-buster,” Frobisher says. “I have a friend who claims dykes lack a sense of humor, but—”
“You have friends?” Freddi asks. “Wow. Who knew?”
“—but you obviously prove him wrong. You guys don’t have more hours because the company is now surviving on computers alone. Mostly cheap ones made in China and the Philippines. The great majority of our customers no longer want the other shit we sell.” Brady thinks only Tones Frobisher would say the great majority. “This is partly because of the technological revolution, but it’s also because—”
Together, Freddi and Brady chant, “—Barack Obama is the worst mistake this country ever made!”
Frobisher regards them sourly for a moment, then says, “At least you listen. Brady, you’re off at two, is that correct?”
“Yes. My other gig starts at three.”
Frobisher wrinkles the overlarge schnozzola in the middle of his face to show what he thinks of Brady’s other job. “Did I hear you say something about returning to school?”
Brady doesn’t reply to this, because anything he says might be the wrong thing. Anthony “Tones” Frobisher must not know that Brady hates him. F*cking loathes him. Brady hates everybody, including his drunk mother, but it’s like that old country song says: no one has to know right now.
“You’re twenty-eight, Brady. Old enough so you no longer have to rely on shitty pool coverage to insure your automobile—which is good—but a little too old to be training for a career in electrical engineering. Or computer programming, for that matter.”
“Don’t be a turd,” Freddi says. “Don’t be a Tones Turd.”
“If telling the truth makes a man a turd, then a turd I shall be.”
“Yeah,” Freddi says. “You’ll go down in history. Tones the Truth-Telling Turd. Kids will learn about you in school.”
“I don’t mind a little truth,” Brady says quietly.
“Good. You can don’t-mind all the time you’re cataloguing and stickering DVDs. Starting now.”
Brady nods good-naturedly, stands up, and dusts the seat of his pants. The Discount Electronix fifty-percent-off sale starts the following week; management in New Jersey has mandated that DE must be out of the digital-versatile-disc business by January of 2011. That once profitable line of merchandise has been strangled by Netflix and Redbox. Soon there will be nothing in the store but home computers (made in China and the Philippines) and flat-screen TVs, which in this deep recession few can afford to buy.
“You,” Frobisher says, turning to Freddi, “have an out-call.” He hands her a pink work invoice. “Old lady with a screen freeze. That’s what she says it is, anyway.”
“Yes, mon capitan. I live to serve.” She stands up, salutes, and takes the call-sheet he holds out.
“Tuck your shirt in. Put on your cap so your customer doesn’t have to be disgusted by that weird haircut. Don’t drive too fast. Get another ticket and life as you know it on the Cyber Patrol is over. Also, pick up your f*cking cigarette butts before you go.”
He disappears inside before she can return his serve.
“DVD stickers for you, an old lady with a CPU probably full of graham cracker crumbs for me,” Freddi says, jumping down and putting her hat on. She gives the bill a gangsta twist and starts across to the VWs without even glancing at her cigarette butts. She does pause long enough to look back at Brady, hands on her nonexistent boy hips. “This is not the life I pictured for myself when I was in the fifth grade.”
“Me, either,” Brady says quietly.
He watches her putt away, on a mission to rescue an old lady who’s probably going crazy because she can’t download her favorite mock-apple pie recipe. This time Brady wonders what Freddi would say if he told her what life was like for him when he was a kid. That was when he killed his brother. And his mother covered it up.
Why would she not?
After all, it had sort of been her idea.