But that’s a little later.
At the moment, Hollis is watching one of the dropout boys out in the parking lot pry loose a medium-size conch shell—a Strombus gigas he prizes for its depth of color—from the hood of his art car. Hollis wants to twist off a table leg and beat the boy. Around him, at the other tables, heads swivel. He suspects he’s yelled an obscenity, maybe even a threat. He removes his hand from the table leg. Tries to smile to put everyone at ease, but he can taste the bile at the back of his throat. He focuses on his chocolate-dipped cone. Licks it tentatively. The whole shop smells of his anxiety. He closes his eyes a moment to calm himself. Sees the boy’s limp body on the pavement, his splayed, upturned palm. The conch. Its rosy insides like last light. But one of its horns is broken off. There’s a roaring in Hollis’s ears.
Sir? Someone touches his shoulder. He flinches, fumbles his dipped cone to the floor. It’s a hideous ruin on the tile. Separated into three parts. Incompatible. A fringed spatter of chocolate outlines the body.
Sir? It’s one of the counter girls. He’s noticed her before. She wears a flesh-colored hearing aid in her right ear, though you can barely see it. He wonders if she hears the same roaring he does. She has a large nose. Healthy nostrils. Elastic skin. She smells of high school hallways.
Are you okay? She asks this softly. She looks him over. Some of the people around him are still glancing his way, interested. Maybe protective.
He looks down at the ruin of his cone. Out to the parking lot, his car, the boy, the conch. Shadows falling. I’m just dandy, he says, near tears.
The girl, after some discussions with her associates, replaces his cone with a double. When she comes by and presents it to him—Voila, monsieur, she says—he notices a series of curved shapes, raised hieroglyphics along the inside of her wrist. He gently touches her there, the smooth elasticity of her skin. I will not forget you, he thinks. I’ve carved you on the palm of my hand.
She smiles at him as if she knows Isaiah by heart.
What did this hideous man look like? the detectives ask him later (how much later Hollis can’t say). He tries to describe him to the well-groomed sketch artist they’ve brought in, just the basics, the feel of the hideous man’s presence. He thinks of the disquieting sheen of the black buttons on the man’s coat. The man’s older companion tapping out a song on a table with a plastic spoon.
The light in the little room gives everything a greenish tint, like the air before a storm. Hollis can’t get it right. The detectives sigh and bully him. One throws a pencil at the wall and it makes a ka-tic sound. They send the sketch artist away. Finally, Hollis says something—not about the hideous man, but about the boy and the conch in the parking lot, the grievous injury to his car—and the detectives’ eyes grow bright. They ask him to concentrate. Can you draw the man in the long coat, the one who stood in line? Can you do that for us, Mr. Finger?
The hideous man, Hollis says.
Yes, the hideous man.
Hollis can hear yelling in another small room somewhere. A silverfish flits at the edge of his vision. He shuffles the drawing paper. One of the detectives picks up the pencil off the floor. When Hollis has finished the drawing, the detectives lean over him, block the light with their bodies. Finally they say, Look, Mr. Finger, what you’ve drawn here is a nostril, and here you’ve depicted in detail the skin flap of an eyelid.
There’s no pleasing some people, Hollis thinks.
5
MICHAEL GREER IS seventeen. He’s sitting in an idling Volvo wagon behind the ice cream shop with the headlights off. He’s the lookout and driver. The car is stolen and they’ve switched the plates. It’s cold out, but the windows are down because he’s sweating. His mouth is dry. He popped two tabs of Vicodin a little while ago to calm his nerves. The night presses close but drifts away at the edges. A pecan tree looms above the car. Every time the wind picks up, a few pecans plunk loudly off the roof.