Bad Men (2003) Read online

  “I’d better go take a look,” Dupree said as Sally nodded a good-bye and returned to the bar. “You excuse me for a couple of minutes? I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  He rose and laid his hand gently on her shoulder as he passed by her. She brushed his fingers with her hand, and felt his grip linger for a moment before he left her.

  Dupree walked down Island Avenue and made a right. Straight downhill on the left was the island’s ferry terminal and across from it was the Rudder Bar. It had an open deck at its rear, which filled up with tourists during the summer but was empty now that winter had come. Inside, he could see lights and a half dozen people drinking and playing pool.

  He entered the bar and saw Scarfe and Lubey immediately. They were sitting at the bar, leaning into each other. Lubey raised his glass as Sally came out from the small kitchen behind the bar.

  “Hey, Sal, you got any shots that taste like pussy?”

  “I wouldn’t know what pussy tastes like,” said Sally, glancing at Dupree as he drew closer.

  Lubey lifted a finger and extended it to her.

  “Then lick here,” he said, and the two men collapsed into laughter.

  “How you doing, boys?” said Dupree.

  The two men turned in unison to look at him.

  “We’re not your boys,” said Lubey. His eyes were dull. He swayed slightly as he tried to keep Dupree in focus.

  “It’s the Jolly Green Giant,” said Scarfe. “What’s wrong, Mr. Giant? You don’t look so jolly no more.”

  “We don’t usually see you over here, Terry. Last I heard, you were doing three to five.”

  “I got paroled. Good behavior.”

  “I don’t think your behavior is so good tonight.”

  “What’s your problem, Off-fis-sur?” said Lubey. “I’m having a drink with my buddy. We ain’t bothering nobody.”

  “I think you’ve had enough.”

  “What are you going to do?” asked Lubey. “Shoot me?”

  Dupree looked at him. Lubey held the gaze for as long as he could, then glanced away, a dumb smile playing on his lips. Dupree returned his attention to Scarfe.

  “I want you off the island, Terry. Thorson has a crossing in ten minutes. You be on that ferry.”

  Scarfe looked at Lubey, shrugged, then slid from his stool and picked up his jacket.

  “The Green Giant wants me off the island, Carl, so I got to go. I’ll be seeing you.”

  “Yeah, be seeing you, Terry. Fight the power.”

  Dupree stepped back and watched as Scarfe headed unsteadily for the door, then turned back to Lubey.

  “You drive here?” he asked.

  Lubey didn’t reply.

  “I asked you a question, Carl.”

  “Yeah, I drove,” said Lubey at last.

  “Give me your keys.”

  The other man dug into his pockets and found his car keys. As Dupree reached out for them, Lubey dropped them to the floor.

  “Whoops,” he said.

  “Pick them up.”

  He climbed from the stool, bent down gingerly, then toppled over. Dupree helped him to his feet, picking up the keys as he did so. Once he was upright again, Lubey shrugged off the policeman’s hand.

  “Get your hands off me.”

  “You want me to put you in cuffs, I will. We can get a boat over here and you can spend the night in a cell.”

  Lubey reached for his coat.

  “I’m going,” he said.

  “You can pick up your keys from the station house in the morning.”

  Lubey waved a hand in dismissal and headed for the door. Behind the bar, Jeb Burris took off his apron and said: “I’ll give him a ride back.”

  Dupree nodded and gave him Lubey’s car keys.

  “Yeah, do that.”

  Back outside, he watched as Terry Scarfe and two other people, tourists who’d been eating at the restaurant, climbed onboard Thorson’s ferry and headed back to Portland.

  Scarfe kept looking back at the island, and Dupree, until the ferry faded from view.

  Marianne had enjoyed a couple of glasses of wine at dinner, Dupree a single beer. He offered to drive her back to her house and said he would arrange to have her car dropped at her door before eight the next morning. She sat in the passenger seat of Dupree’s own Jeep and stared in silence through the side window. Dupree wanted to believe that it was a comfortable silence, but he sensed her sadness as he drove.

  “You okay?”

  She nodded, but her mouth wrinkled and he could see that she was near tears.

  “It’s been a long time, you know?”

  He didn’t, and he felt foolish for not knowing.

  “Since what?”

  “Since I had a nice evening with a man. I’d kind of forgotten what it was like.”

  He coughed to hide his embarrassment and his secret pleasure.

  “You always cry at the end of a nice evening?”

  She smiled and wiped at the tears with the tips of her fingers.

  “Hell, I must have snail trails running down my face.”

  “No, you look good.”

  “Liar.”

  He hung a right into the driveway of her small house and pulled up outside her door. She looked at him.

  “Would you like to come in? I can make you coffee.”

  “Sure. Coffee would be good.”

  He followed her inside, and sat on the edge of the living-room couch as she went to the bathroom to fix her makeup. When she came out, she went straight to the kitchen and put the kettle on the stove, then swore.

  “I’m sorry,” she called out. “I’ve only got instant.”

  “It’ll be just like home.”

  She peered around the corner of the doorway, unsure if he was being sarcastic.

  He caught the look.

  “No, honest, it will be just like home. All I ever make is instant.”

  “Well, if you say so. Put on some music, if you like.”

  He rose and walked to the pile of CDs that lay stacked against the wall. A JVC system stood on the third shelf of the Home Depot bookcase. He tried squatting and looking sideways at the CDs, then kneeling. Finally, he lay flat on the floor and ran his finger down the spines.

  “I don’t recognize any of this stuff,” he said as she came into the room carrying two mugs of coffee on a tray.

  “You’re out of touch,” she said.

  “Radio reception sucks this far out, and I don’t go over to the mainland as much as I used to. Hey, are the Doobie Brothers still together?”

  “I hear Michael McDonald left,” she said. “Things aren’t looking so good for Simon and Garfunkel either.”

  He smelled her perfume as she knelt down beside him, and her arm brushed his hair gently as she reached across and carefully removed a disc from the pile. He placed his hand against the discs beneath, steadying them so that they would not fall. She put a bright blue CD into the player, then skipped through the tracks until she got to number six. Slow funk emerged from the speakers.

  “Sounds like Prince,” he said.

  She cocked an eyebrow at him. “Maybe you’re not so out of touch after all. You’re close. It’s Maxwell. This track’s called ‘Til the Cops Come Knockin’. I thought you might appreciate the humor.”

  “It’s good,” he said. “The song, I mean. The humor I’m not so sure about.”

  She swiped at him playfully, then rose and sipped her coffee, her body swaying slightly to the music. Dupree watched her from the floor, then turned awkwardly and stood from the knees up. He lifted his coffee mug, instinctively grasping it in his hand instead of trying unsuccessfully to fit his finger through the handle. Little things, he thought. It’s the little things you have to remember.

  Marianne walked to the window and looked out on the dark woods beyond. Her body grew still. He waited for her to speak.

  “The bird—” she began, and he felt his back stiffen in response. Had she also noticed their absence? Instantly, his
conversation with Amerling and Jack returned to him, and the pleasure of the evening began to dissipate like smoke.

  “The gull that you put out of its misery?”

  He felt relieved for a moment, until he thought about Danny and the look on his face after he had killed the bird.

  “Like I said, I’m sorry about that,” he interrupted. “I should have made him walk away.”

  “No, it’s not that. I think Danny dug it up, after you’d left. I think he dug it up and…did something to it.”

  “Like what?”

  “I found blood and feathers.” She left her fear unspoken, hoping the policeman would pick up on it.

  Dupree put his cup down and stood beside her.

  “He’s a boy. They can be curious about things like that. If you want, I can talk to him.”

  “I guess I’m just worried.”

  “Has he ever hurt any living animals?”

  “I’ve told him off for throwing stones at cats, and he’s mischievous about bugs and stuff, but I don’t think he’s ever really hurt anything.”

  “Well, then. I’d maybe leave him be this time.”

  She nodded, but he sensed once again that she was far away from him, walking in the country of her past. He finished his coffee and placed the mug carefully on the tray.

  “I’d better be going,” he said.

  She didn’t reply, but as he moved to get his coat, her hand reached for him and laid itself softly upon his arm. He could feel the heat of her through the fabric of his shirt. She looked up at him, and the expression on her face was unreadable.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Like I said, it’s been a long time. I’ve forgotten how this should go.”

  Then he inclined his head and body toward her, bending almost double to reach her. He kissed her, and her mouth opened beneath his, and her body moved against him. Later, she led him into her bedroom and they undressed in darkness, and he found her by the light of her eyes and the paleness of her skin and the fading scent of her perfume. For a time, all of their pain was forgotten, and the night gathered them to itself and wrapped them, briefly, in peace.

  And while they made love, the painter Giacomelli sat in his studio, the lamp on the table casting its harsh light across brushes and paints and leaning canvases. Jack wanted a drink. He wanted a drink very badly, but he was too afraid to drink. He wanted to be alert and ready. After his conversation with Dupree and Larry Amerling, he had gone for a late-afternoon walk along the wooded trails that crisscrossed the center of the island, but he had not gone as far as the Site. Instead, he had stood at a forest of dead trees, the roots drowned by bog, and looked toward the dark interior in which the ruins lay. There was a stillness there, it seemed, the kind of quiescence that comes on late-summer days when the sky is overcast, the heat oppressive and unyielding, and the world waits for the weather to break and the skies to explode violently into rain. He stood on the trail, looking out over the patch of dead beech trees, their trunks gray and skewed as their decaying root structures failed to hold them upright. A mist seemed to hang about them—no, not a mist, exactly, but rather it appeared as if their slow decay had now become visible, the tiny fragments combining to cast a veil over the trees and the ground. He dragged his fingers across the front of his coat and raised his hand before him, expecting to see them coated in gray, but they were clean.

  He walked no farther that day.

  Now he sat and stared at one of the flawed paintings, which were, in their way, better than anything that he had ever done before, for the waves seemed to move over the bodies, causing them to bob slightly in the tide, and there was a silver light over the waters and the rocks that he had never previously managed to capture, for it had never been apparent to him until now. In fact, he admitted, he couldn’t recall adding the sheen of light to the picture either, and no moon hung in the dusk sky of his work.

  Or what used to be his work.

  Moloch woke.

  For a moment, he felt himself in the semidarkness of the prison, for in the cell block a dull light hung over all things, even at night. He could hear men snoring, and footsteps. He raised himself from the sweat of his pillow and ran his hands through his hair, then saw Willard, now also awake, watching him from his post beneath the window, the curtains drawn to discourage snoopers.

  He had been dreaming again, but this time there was no girl and no killing. Instead, he was alone among the trees, walking through wooded trails, dead leaves crunching beneath his feet, moonlight gilding the branches. Yet when he looked up there was no moon visible, and the skies were black with clouds. Ahead of him lay a darkness, marked only by the thin shapes of dead beech trees, impaled upon the earth like the spears of giants.

  Something waited for him in the shadows.

  I could map this place, he thought, this landscape of my dreams. I know it well, for I have seen it every night for the last year, and each time it becomes more familiar to me. I know its paths, its rocks, the landings along its coastline. Only that darkness, and what lies within it, is hidden from me.

  But in time, I will know that too.

  He got to his feet. Willard remained seated, his eyes fixed on him.

  “You okay?” asked Moloch.

  “Dexter doesn’t like me,” said Willard. “Shepherd neither.”

  “They don’t have to like you.”

  “I think they want to hurt me.”

  Moloch was grateful for the cover of darkness.

  “They won’t do that. They’ll do what I say.”

  “What you say,” echoed Willard. He spoke in a monotone.

  “That’s right. Now let’s go downstairs, get something to eat.”

  He waited until Willard rose. For a moment, they stood together at the doorway, each seemingly unwilling to turn his back on the other. At last, Willard stepped through, and Moloch followed him, just as Moloch had followed him from the bar years before.

  I trust you.

  Followed him to a house.

  They’ll do what I say.

  Followed him to a woman.

  What you say.

  And bound himself to Willard in damnation.

  The Last Day

  And how can man die better

  Than facing fearful odds…

  —Macaulay, “Horatius”

  Chapter Eight

  The giant was gone. He left her before the clock read five, for he would soon have to relieve the patrolmen on duty and allow them to catch the ferry back to the mainland. A new cop was coming over on the return leg; a rookie, he said, one who had never been given island duty before. He stroked her hair as he spoke, his arm holding her to him as they lay close together in the false intimacy resulting from their lovemaking.

  For it was false. Dupree wanted to be close to her, but how could he draw near when she would tell him so little and when he suspected the veracity of even those small details that she chose to reveal? In the restaurant, he had been startled by how beautiful she looked. During her time on the island, it had seemed to him that she did all that she could not to attract attention, to downplay and even to camouflage her looks. But when she’d entered Good Eats that night, heads had turned, and Dupree had tried hard not to look smug as she walked to his table. It made him determined that the night should be special for her, for them both. Without being asked, Dale Zimmer had taken personal responsibility for their meal, moving between the kitchen and the dining room, solicitous without being overbearing. From their window table overlooking the water they could see the lights of the neighboring islands shining brightly, like small night suns hoping to dazzle the stars. In the candlelight, he had found himself occasionally overawed by her and had concentrated so hard on trying not to break or spill anything that his head hurt by the end of the meal. The only taints upon the evening were the encounter with Lubey and Scarfe at the Rudder, and Dupree’s niggling concern at the fact that his companion was still keeping things from him.

  Marianne was aware of his unease. Her years
spent moving and hiding had heightened her perceptions, making her acutely sensitive to how others were regarding her. Now, alone, she replayed the events of the previous night in her mind, recalling his reactions, his hesitations, the fleeting changes in expression as he listened to her speak. She had not intended the night to end as it had, or if she had, then she had not admitted it to herself. But as the evening went on, and the wine began to have its effect, she wondered what it would be like to make love to him, to take him inside her. She had been a little afraid; afraid of the weight of him, his bulk, and the awkwardness that came with it, for there was little that was graceful about him. He was a man constantly waiting for the sound of falling objects, a man always out of step with the world. But then he came to her bed, and he was gentle, and his touch was surprisingly tender.

  She felt guilty for lying to him about her past, but she had no choice in the matter. To tell him the truth could lead to her losing Danny. Worse, it would expose her, and then he would find out.

  And his people would come.

  Lost amid birdsong, the warmth of him still upon the pillow, Marianne began to cry.

  Dupree drove first to his own house, where he showered and changed into his uniform. In his bathroom, as he listened to the water running in the shower, he smelled Marianne upon him and felt a twinge of regret that her scent would soon be washed from his body. Later, after he had changed, he picked up his shirt from the night before and brought it to his face. There was a small stain on the material where her face had pressed against him and he touched the traces of makeup with his fingertip. Then he carefully placed the shirt in the bathroom closet, above the laundry basket.