The inbetween, p.22
The InBetween, page 22
part #1 of Painter Mann Series
He looked to the curb in front of his home. “Hey! You forgot your car!”
She stopped, her fists at her sides, smoke wafting from one hand, the trail of the ember doing circles as she fumed, then slowly turned back, stepped into the street, and headed toward her car.
“Looks like you made your girl fearsome mad,” Julius said, straightening out his thick gray coat. In the handful of times I’d seen him, it appeared that the man never wore less than three or four layers of clothes. “You want to go apologize?”
Hank looked toward Julius, noticing him for the first time.
“I don’t mind waiting. I’m old. I do a lot of waiting.”
Hank blinked slowly, a bit wobbly on his feet. Obviously, the bottle in his hand wasn’t the first he’d opened that day.
“Who the hell are you?”
“I’m a friend of the family,” Julius said and introduced himself. “I was told you wouldn’t mind if I stopped by.”
“What? What family? Who said you could come by?”
“Son, you know you’re just in your shorts out here, don’t ya?” Julius said, smiling widely. “Let’s get you inside, and we’ll jaw, you and me, for a little bit. My legs are killin’ me.”
Hank’s beer-soaked brain couldn’t process a clever response—or any response. Julius had already sauntered past him and was heading inside. Brenda and I were both a little weakened after the episode on the stairs but pulled ourselves up and inside as Hank slammed the door.
My head, despite it not carrying even an ounce of weight, lolled low, my chin to my chest, as I tried to deal with even less energy than I’d started with that day. I nearly fell to the floor when Brenda yelled out, “Not the couch!”
Julius spun around slowly. “Why not the couch?”
Taking a deep breath, I wheezed out, “Chair, man. Just go with the chair.”
Hank said, “Are you senile or something?” He turned in to the kitchen. The clank of an empty beer bottle landing on a pile of others split the air. A moment later, he came back with two more and, surprisingly, handed one to Julius.
Despite his shortcomings, the guy must have had a good momma. So maybe not entirely a shitty dude. The younger man sat on the couch, got a queer look on his face for a moment, then slid to the far end of the piece of furniture.
Julius looked at the beer and smiled more widely. “Been a little while. Thank you kindly.” He then set the beer down next to his chair and leaned forward.
Hank’s eyes danced a little in his head, and then he said, “I don’t even know why I let you in. I don’t know you.” He then looked upward, as if he was checking some files in his brain. “Do I?”
Julius regarded the man for a moment and said, “I mighta met you at Margaret’s funeral. There were a lot of people there. She was a much-loved woman.”
Hank suddenly got intensely interested in the paper label of his beer bottle. “I, uh, missed that. She was, you know, real great to me.” His eyes watered slightly. “A lot of the other family, they saw me as some kinda piranha.”
“You mean pariah, I think. The other one is a freaky fish with teeth.”
“Whatever it is, they hate me,” he said and took a swig of brew. “So I guess I figured people wanted me to stay away.”
“Margaret liked you,” Julius said with a grin. “I think she would have liked you to be there.”
Hank shrugged, lifted the bottle to his lips again, then wiped his eye with two hairy fingers on his beer-holding hand. He shivered slightly for a moment, then asked, “Is that why you’re here? ‘Cause I didn’t show up?”
“No, no, nothing like that. Funerals are more for the living than the dead. If you didn’t show, Maggie will know you didn’t mean no offense.”
Hank shrugged, his mouth hanging slightly open now.
I quickly ran through what we needed to know, and Julius bobbed his head for a moment, listening. He then processed it and looked at the other man with kind eyes.
“Margaret did like you,” Julius began. “You were one of her favorites.”
“Favorite what?”
Julius blinked. “People.”
“Oh.”
“What did you think I was talking about?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she knew a lot of guys named Hank,” he said and took a slug of his beer. “And I was, you know, a favorite Hank.”
“Uh huh,” the old man said. “Yes, well, you know, there was an old ballplayer named Favorite Hank. Favorite Hank Anderson. Good fielder, probably. Or shortstop. Maybe.”
“Really?”
“No.”
“Then why would you say that?”
“I don’t know. I’ve lost my bearings in this conversation entirely,” Julius said, then before Hank could protest, he added, “So Margaret told me as she lay dying—”
“Jesus, Julius,” I said.
“—she said, ‘Julius. Now you go see my son-in-law and—'”
“Ex-son-in-law,” Hank said, his words fuzzy at their edges.
The old man shrugged. “She didn’t see it that way. Anyways, she wanted you to clear your conscience, boy. She said you needed to get some stuff off your chest.”
“About what?”
“That night,” Julius said, his hands spread wide. “The night it all went wrong for you. The night you shot Boyd.”
Hank leaned forward, shaking slightly. At first, he looked as if he was sobbing. Then I heard his low, scratchy laugh. It was phlegmy, unpleasant.
“Man,” he said. “My life ‘all went wrong’ a long, long time ago. That night was just icing on the cake.”
Julius sat back in the chair and softened his approach. Reaching down, he grabbed the beer Hank had given him and tipped it to his lips. “Margaret had a lot of faith in you. More than you got in yourself. I can see that.”
“What do you know?” Hank said through gritted teeth.
“I only know what she told me. That she loved you, and it hurt her heart to see you hurting yourself.”
“Sh-she…” Hank stammered. “She said she loved me? Even after, you know, the divorce and all that. And me, you know, shooting Boyd and all?”
Julius nodded slowly and pointed the opened bottle toward Hank. “She said you gotta just get right. You hafta clear the air.”
Eyes wide now, as if he were about to hear some secret to happiness that had eluded him, Hank whispered, “About what?”
“About that night. About the night you shot that man.”
Hank stood, arms hanging heavily off his shoulders, and he walked around to the back of the couch and leaned forward on his elbows. “I already have. I talked to the police. Told them everything.”
“Not everything.”
That stopped the younger man briefly, then he waved his hand lazily in the air.
“Yeah, I did. I mean, that was going to be my last night of freedom. I’d already planned it. Got lit on Wild Turkey and headed to Boyd’s office. He had a shitty two-room space at a strip mall about two miles’ walk from here.”
“I hear ya.”
“Had a .38 I got from a buddy of mine a little while back,” he said and covered his eyes for a moment. “Never told Larry, but I wasn’t planning on using it on anyone but, you know, myself.”
Julius nodded slowly, not interrupting the man’s flow. Just listening, nodding.
“But then the night I was gonna do it, pressed it up against my head,” he said, shoving a dirty finger to his temple. “Then I thought… ‘This ain’t right. I got a better use for all this lead.’ So I grabbed my jacket and headed out the door.”
Hank sighed then stretched out on the couch in the spot he’d previously avoided.
“I had the whiskey in this old Army-Navy surplus store canteen I got. Gun tucked into my belt, under my coat, right? I felt like some soldier heading off to battle. Like an idiot, tugging away on that whiskey, getting braver and braver as I went.”
Hank went to take another sip of beer, but the bottle was empty. His eyes were damp.
“That man took my wife. My daughter,” Hank said, sobbing but with angry eyes. “He took my life. So I was gonna take his.”
“But Margaret told me it didn’t go down like that,” Julius prodded. “You showed up, and the fool had already died. Overdose or something.”
Hank nodded, smiling through tears. “Son-of-a-bitch beat me to it. I came in and yelled at him, gun leveled at him. He didn’t even move. I walked over, jammed the pistol into his neck, and he just lay there face down on the desk. Dead. Spit and shit dripping all outta his mouth and nose.”
“And yet you shot him,” Julius said. “You shot a dead man.”
Hank shrugged and looked around the room. “I was angry. Then I passed out on his shitty little love seat. First thing I remember was the cops handcuffing me, reading me my rights.”
“But you didn’t kill him.”
“Sure, they realized that, and eventually, they let me go. They didn’t want to, no way,” Hank said and let out a bitter laugh. “They did everything they could. Tried to say that I’d forced him to take the drugs and shit like that, but it didn’t stick because it wasn’t true. And didn’t make sense, because if I tried to get him to OD, why the fuck would I shoot the bastard, then?”
That was my question. It still didn’t make sense. I asked Julius to push him on the point.
“So,” Julius said after a few moments, “why did you then?”
Hank looked back at him as if he’d just about forgotten the old man was there. “What?”
“Why did you shoot a man who was already dead?”
“I told you! He took everything from—”
Julius put a hand up. “I know you said that, and that’s probably in some way true. At least from your perspective. However, if I may, my guess is that you helped drive your family away.” This time, Julius’s eyes watered slightly. “Trust me, little brother. I know all about that. Some men are stupid like that. We get a good woman and don’t feel we deserve her or something is all fouled up in our head. And we do what we can to push the best thing in our lives away.”
Hank looked at the man, opened and closed his mouth a few times, but no sound came out. After a few seconds, he merely nodded, wiped his face with a sleeve.
“But that doesn’t make us shoot a man who is already dead,” Julius said, leaning forward. “Now, I told you, your mother-in-law, she loved you, and she wanted you to get this right. Clear the air and move on, son.”
“I… I mean…”
“And all that means is you get it out. Just clear the air and, clean slate, get back onto getting your life together.”
Hank started to stand then sank back down onto the couch.
Brenda looked to me and nodded excitedly. She urged Julius to press him a little, but the old man gave the slightest shake of his head. He waited. Hank looked at Julius with such a queer expression that my breath caught in my throat. Then he drew his arm across his mouth for a moment, slowly shaking his head.
“Hank,” Julius said softly, “there’s just you and me here, and I’ll be dead in a few days, maybe a week or so. But when I go, I wanna be able to go see ol’ Maggie and tell her that you and me, we got her boy right.”
Slowly, Hank nodded, and the words began falling from his mouth despite themselves.
“Never told the cops, because…”
“I’m not telling the cops anything,” Julius said. “We ain’t never been friends, no use in starting now.”
“Well, I was mad at the guy, you know? He had everything I wanted, everything I worked for. It’s like you’re going through the grocery store, and you head to the back corner and grab the milk. Then you make your way slowly to the front of the store. Bread, spaghetti, canned fruit, salami. And as you’re standing there at the checkout, you go, ‘Oh shit, I forgot the beer,’” Hank said and snorted. “Then you come back, and some asshole’s grabbed your cart, all the stuff that matters to you, and he’s already in the parking lot.”
I could see Julius pressing his palms into the fabric of the seat. Here was this guy equating his family, all that he held dear in life, to a trip to the supermarket deli counter. But still, it was hard not to see his point.
“Sure, maybe I shouldn’ta gone back for the beer…”
“Right,” Julius offered.
“I coulda taken the, you know, cart back with me to the coolers.”
“Got it.”
“And there’s a chance I may have stopped for some Cheezits on the way back to the—”
“Can we get outta the damn grocery store?” Julius said, finally breaking.
Hank sat motionless, his mouth hanging open for a moment, eyes wide. Then he slowly reanimated, like one of those old record players after someone had mistakenly tripped on the cord, then the plug getting inserted into the wall again.
“Right, well, it…” Hank said, looking at his hands as he twisted his fingers. “So I don’t even knock on the door to the guy’s office, bust right in. For whatever reason, I leave my half-drunk canteen outside the door. Maybe I’m afraid I might spill it.”
“In your mindset, understandable.”
Hank said, his eyes staring out into the middle distance again, “He’s got the radio on, real low, which is annoying ‘cause you can’t hear the song. It’s more like… it sounds more like this voice with no body, whispering. Can’t make it out, it’s just whispering.”
Julius lifted the bottle from the chair next to him, patiently waiting, and tipped it to his lips again. I noticed for the first time that the level of beer had not changed from when it was handed to him.
“And…” the old man said, and waited for a moment. “You shot him.”
Hank nodded. “A couple times in the chest.”
Wait.
“Then I emptied the pistol into him.”
I looked at Brenda, but she was staring at Hank, the mascara lines streaking her face looking darker than before.
To Julius, I said, “How’d he shoot the guy in the chest if he was leaned forward, face down on the desk?”
Julius looked around the room as if searching for the source of my voice. Then he seemed to remember something. He relayed the question to Hank. Then the younger man did the strangest thing. A small smile stretched his lips. Not malevolent, not menacing. Just a smile. One you might have if you’d just caught an old, sad song on the radio you hadn’t heard in years.
“You know,” he said, “the cops asked that, but I brushed them off, and they didn’t care too much. After the undertaker guy, or whatever, said that the shots came after he was dead, I guess they all thought… what was the point?”
Julius saw it. “You’re saying he wasn’t dead? The man was still alive?”
“Not according to the cops. They split the guy open and said, hands down, the guy was dead when I shot him.”
“But you think he maybe was still breathing or something?”
Hank again shook his head, the smile fading by a degree. “Not breathing, man. Walking. The prick who stole my family was walking right at me. He was supposed to be dead—hell, he even looked cold to me, and he had this look in his eyes.”
“What do you mean ‘look’?”
“I’d met Boyd a couple times,” Hank said. “He’d handled our taxes for a few years before. I could always tell he had something… you know, the way he would look at Ally. Something there.”
“Okay.”
“But it was, you know, his eyes were always gentle or something, right? Christ, the guy was an accountant. Not like he was a taxman by day and evildoer by night. Hands soft, body soft, eyes soft,” Hank said and went into the kitchen for another beer.
The empty went clank on top of the others.
Fresh bottle in his hand, he leaned against the door jamb that led from the living room to the kitchen.
“I don’t care what the cops say. That guy wasn’t dead. I didn’t shoot no dead guy,” Hank said, taking a slug of beer. “Hell, I may not have even shot him in the first place, probably would have chickened out. Gone back to my Wild Turkey at the door. But then he was just coming at me, you know?”
“The dead guy?”
“He wasn’t dead, man. And those eyes, those soft eyes, they weren’t soft no more. Hard as a fucking knife’s edge,” Hank said. “I’ll admit it to you, and you… you can tell Mags. I shot that guy because he scared the shit out of me.”
Julius was incredulous. “The accountant?”
Another swig. “I don’t know who was coming at me, the guy that the cops say was dead and all. It may have been him, but those eyes? Whatever was behind those eyes, that wasn’t the accountant. That wasn’t Boyd.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Once outside again, I asked Julius to walk to the bus stop, where he could sit down and we could all get our heads around what we’d just heard. The early-afternoon sun was reflecting off the storefronts of a strip mall. “For lease” signs hung in every window.
The bus stop was sheltered, and all the plexiglass was either marked with some gang tag or scratched so thoroughly it had become opaque. I began to wonder if the bus stop was used for more than catching the bus.
“I think meeting Hank that first time set a path for me,” I said, thinking it through. “Brenda, you and me, we’re just energy now. When we interact, it creates a shot of magnetism. That’s how Lonnie’s presence drew you off when you were following the Ringman. It was familiar. You had come close to Lonnie, and there’s a link.”
The reporter nodded. “Sure. I found you pretty easily in that power station because I sort of felt you.”
“Right,” I said. “Whatever was in Boyd, Hank had come close to it. After my first run-in with Hank, then I smacked into the mailman, then you. It was… there was a draw. The familiar.”
Julius was listening to us talk, his brow growing more wrinkled by the minute.
“I don’t really get it,” Brenda said.
It was starting to click now. “Remember how Lonnie described the thug who’d come into the bar that night, all those years ago?”
Julius squinted against the sun. “Who’s Lonnie?”
