Toadies - "Happy Face"

You know you've been waiting for this....

The Square Shoulder of a Man Named Butch continues:

IX

“It’s been long enough,” said Mark Gabeheart, his brow furrowed in concentration as he looped and knotted his tie in front of the mirror.

            “Yes, I know, but I keep hoping she will show up here. It’s not like her to steal. She must have felt so desperate,” replied Claire, pulling the stiff tissue stuffing out of a new purse.

            “You should report this, cancel your credit cards. Do something,” and although he tried to sound gently concerned, anger laced his clipped words.

            “I’ve been thinking about it…she hasn’t used any of my cards, I checked all the balances just this morning. I just think that she will come here or call, or stop me in the garage again.” Claire frowned as she perched on the edge of the bed slipping her slender feet into strappy heels.

            “She probably just took the cash and threw the rest away, that’s what junkies do—“

            “She’s not a junkie. You know, you’re as much to blame for any of this as I am. She’s just a child who was torn from her home!”

            “Torn from her home! Listen, those people were growing pot plants in the shed in their back yard. They deserved to go to jail,” Mark was furious now.

            “You know who deserves to go to jail? Parents who have meth labs in their bathrooms, who unnecessarily expose their children to those chemicals; but the maximum sentence for both parents, on cultivation charges? No probation instead of jail time. That’s absurd. You could have given them a slap on the wrists, probation, drug screening. I’m sure that they were just trying to get by. Her mom had recently lost her job. There’s no way that they could make it on one income for long. This economy, it does things to people. Some people do things that they might not otherwise do, good or bad, just to get by,” Claire paced in front of her mirror, finally selecting a lipstick and mirror compact to put in her purse.

            “They broke the law. I set an example. Those who break the law, even if they haven’t ever done anything like that before, are responsible for the consequences. They should have considered where their daughter would end up before they decided to grow marijuana in their back yard!” Mark’s voice was swelling, the anger rising up his neck and spreading in red swatches up his cheeks.

            “I can’t have this conversation with you again, Mark, let’s just forget it. We both fucked up and now that girl is a runaway—,” Claire was pulling her overcoat on and picking up her purse.

            “We fucked up? I was just doing my job,” Mark checked his watch, “Listen we’re going to miss our reservation if we don’t get going,” he pulled on his own overcoat and followed her out toward the kitchen.

            “Whatever, Mark,” she said, resolved not to speak to him anymore, at least not until she’d had a couple of glasses of wine.

X

At home Carl was quite unsure what to do about the man in the trunk. He backed his car up to the back door, coming as close as he could to the concrete steps there. He went to the door, unlocked it, and hurried inside. From the little space he made between the blinds he looked at the neighbor’s houses. No one appeared to be out and about. He gathered some plastic bins from the basement storage closet and stuffed them with two old blankets. He went back out into the rain, sitting the open bins beside the trunk. He listened a moment before working the key in the lock, hearing only the rain and wind in the trees. Slowly he opened the trunk, only to see that the once-unconscious man was now obviously dead, blood spilling from his head and leaving a huge puddle on the otherwise clean upholstery.

He removed the blankets from the bins and threw them inside. He unlocked the doors and sat the bins in the back seat and walked back into the house. His mind was reeling. He had killed someone. Now what? He sat at the kitchen table, his soggy clothes dripping onto the linoleum floor. And put his head between his hands. He listened for a long time. The only noise besides his pounding heart was the rain. It was splattering through the trees and hitting the roof, a metal garbage can outside, and somewhere, a wind chime. He strained to hear an inner voice that was not there. His mother’s wisdom had left him. His mind flicked through every Forensic Files episode he had ever seen. He was thinking gruesome thoughts again.

After a while, he grew cold. He rose from the table and went into the bedroom. He changed out of his damp clothes, stuffing them into a plastic garbage bag. He washed his face in warm water in the bathroom. He put a clean pair of shoes in a grocery sack, slipped on his raincoat, and went back out into the rain. Thinking, once again, in the driver’s seat of the car, he opened the glove box and got out his spare pair of gloves, the cotton kind, some his mother had given him when she went through some of his father’s old things. He slipped them on, and drove out of the city, heading northwest toward the state park.

His headlights sliced through the rain and the gathering darkness as he turned onto a road that led down to the water. The road was long, winding its way to and fro along the river until it ended as a boat ramp slanting into the water. There was enough parking to accommodate several trucks with boat trailers, but the lot was empty. Carl turned away from the water toward the lot, and then reversed to stop a few feet from the edge of the rising river’s rain-dappled surface.  He removed the man from the trunk, arranging the blankets over the bloody spot. He removed the man’s clothes and rolled him into the water. The body disappeared below the churning surface for a few moments, but Carl turned away. He gathered the man’s clothes, briefcase, and cell phone pieces and stuffed them into one of the plastic bins and placed it in the trunk.

He pulled off the highway at a truck stop and had a cup of strong oily coffee. He pulled his car around the back of the restaurant as he was leaving and, after wiping it, and all its contents, obsessively with an old towel, he threw the plastic bin into the dumpster there. He sped away. Very late that night he put his soiled clothes, shoes, towel, and gloves into a garbage can down the street. He crawled into bed and quickly fell into the black hole of sleep.