Know Your Beholder: A Novel Page 4

  The local media has made a pretty big stink about “Little Bethany,” although both the Pollard Pioneer (our daily ultraconservative newspaper) and the WKCG evening news seem to be in cahoots, hell-bent on treating Bethany Bunch’s disappearance more like an alien abduction than something actually disturbing and real.

  Meanwhile we are halfway through the month, and while I try not to dwell on it, Todd and Mary Bunch still owe me rent for January. It’s not easy wrangling money from tenants when they’re down on their luck, let me tell you.

  The Bunches are former trapeze artists in the Ringling Bros. Circus, from which they retired after their daughter was born. They were apparently married during a performance, shouting their I DOs midflight in front of a paying audience in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Todd, a short, quiet, wide-shouldered redhead with “invisible” adult braces, is now a rookie at the local fire department, and Mary, a petite, doll-eyed, slightly haunted-looking milkmaid of a girl, spends almost as much time moored to the house as I do.

  This morning a detective came by. We spoke to each other on the front porch. His last name is Mansard and he is tall the same way high school history professors can be tall and he is severely bowlegged and sports a flesh-colored hearing aid. He possesses the face of an insomniac, distinguished by a nicotine-stained brown-gray mustache, and his line of questioning had mostly to do with the Bunches’ domestic habits, specifically odd behavior, and whether or not there has been any sign of spousal or child abuse, to which I could only answer—and honestly so—that I didn’t know, that I’d never noticed anything out of the ordinary like bruises or limps or silent cries for help. I explained that the house was nearly two hundred years old (it’s 134 years old, actually), with thick walls, fireproof-carpeted floors, and a layer of acoustic vinyl I had installed underneath the carpeting on each story.

  Mansard seemed suspicious of me, as if I was somehow protecting the Bunches. “You really haven’t seen anything?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, my wool hat snagging briefly in the synthetic holiday conifer wreath I’ve yet to remove from the front door. “They come and go, keep to themselves.”

  He asked me what I charge them for rent, and how large their unit is.

  Was this guy actually an undercover rep from some government agency created to investigate amoral landlord behavior? I told him they had the entire first floor, gesturing toward the window behind me, whose heavy brown drapes suddenly made it look funereal. “It’s roughly nine hundred square feet.” Perhaps he was asking about their living conditions because a cramped unit might be motivation for creating more space, thus eliminating a three-year-old?

  “Is it nice in there?” he asked.

  “Nice enough,” I replied. “Simple.”

  He asked me if I spent a lot of time with the Bunches. I told him that I didn’t make it a habit to socialize with my tenants. He wanted to know if they went to church, to which I answered I had no idea. Then he actually asked me if I went to church, and I told him I attended the Church of Neil Young and Crazy Horse.

  “It takes place in my headphones,” I added.

  “You’re Lyman Falbo’s kid,” he said.

  I told him that indeed I was.

  “He did my taxes once. Got me a pretty decent return. How’s your dad doing these days?”

  I told him he was down in Florida with his new wife.

  “He was a helluva bowler,” Mansard said. “Didn’t he bowl a perfect game?”

  “Nineteen seventy-nine,” I said. “He had the score sheet framed.”

  Mansard stroked his calico mustache. He took his time. He acted like someone trying to portray a detective on a TV show. Like there was a camera set up at the other end of the porch and he was filming an audition. At home he probably wears a plaid flannel bathrobe and smokes a pipe. No wife. Maybe a two-decade-old cat sinking into a matching plaid armchair, fat and slow, runny-eyed, blind.

  A tree branch down the street cracked. It sounded like someone’s femur breaking at close proximity.

  Mansard eventually said, “You know, it took them four days to file a missing person’s report.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “That’s ninety-six hours after little Bethany disappeared,” he continued, touching his archaic hearing aid. “Usually, the parents’ll file within four or five hours.”

  I asked him why he was telling me this and he replied that as their landlord I should know the kind of people I’m renting to. “They do hold a proper lease, I presume?”

  I said nothing, but nodded.

  The snow, which had ceased for almost an hour, started again. It looked somehow theatrical, from the Ice Capades or some other holiday extravaganza, as if it had been cued and someone hiding across the street in the Grooms’ ancient sycamore was turning a dial.

  Hazard Groom, the retired Pollard Memorial football coaching legend, was shoveling his driveway in what appeared to be a Formula One fire-retardant racing suit. He also was wearing hiking boots and a hat that made it appear as if an owl had landed on his head. He stared up at the heavens, indignant in the face of the incessant snow.

  “It’s about twenty-four degrees out here,” Mansard said. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

  I explained that there was no common area.

  He asked if we could just go to my unit and I said something about cramped quarters, so he suggested going to get a cup of coffee.

  I told him I was expecting the plumber.

  Then he mentioned the cold again, saying, “I’d really love to get the heck out of this weather.” He blew into cupped hands and stomped his feet.

  I asked him if he’d tried ringing the Bunches’ doorbell.

  “I did,” Mansard replied. “If someone’s in there, they’re sure as hell not answering.” His face was starting to contort from the windchill.

  My unclean, riptiding, transmogrifying beard was protecting me brilliantly, and I was quickly tiring of the storkish bastard and his calico ’stache.

  “Couldn’t you force them to come in for questioning?” I said.

  “Oh, sure I could do that,” Mansard answered obliquely. “Not sure that’s necessary just yet.”

  Was this guy lazy or did he have some weird veteran detective strategy?

  Through gritted teeth he added, “I understand the husband’s a firefighter?”

  I told him that as far as I knew this was true.

  “Former circus couple going straight.”

  “Straight?” I said.

  “The straight life. No more big top. No more freaks. Clowns. Contortionists. Midgets with cardboard swords. The smell of big-game dung and hay. All that fantasy. Suddenly deciding to hunker down and do the neighborly life in a place like Pollard. Going for the quiet America. It’s bound to do a number on your head.”

  “I suppose it could,” I said, and wiggled my toes, which were safely warm inside my merino Ingenius socks, which were covered by a pair of Scandinavian ergonomically advanced wool slippers that Sheila Anne had gotten me for our first Christmas.

  “What do you do,” Mansard then asked, “besides chase down the monthly?”

  I told him I used to be in a band.

  “Like a rock ’n’ roll band?”

  “Um, yeah,” I said. “We played rock ’n’ roll.”

  “What instrument?”

  I told him I mostly played guitar and sang. “Some hand-clapping, too,” I added.

  Then he asked if he would have heard of the band, and I said probably not.

  “What were you guys called?”

  “The Third Policeman.”

  “No kidding?”

  “You’ve heard of us?”

  “No,” he replied. “I mostly listen to Mickey Newbury, Waylon Jennings, that sorta stuff. Kristofferson.” Then he asked if we were interested in police work.

  “Only the police work of the soul,” I replied.

  “There’s no other kind,” he said.

  We were practically flirting, and it felt
just plain weird.

  He cocked his head to the left a bit, as if suddenly beholding something. The gesture was distinctly beaglelike. “Do you always wear the robe?” he queried. “I only ask because there appear to be about thirteen different species of mustard stains at play.”

  I told him I eat a lot of sandwiches.

  “And the hat?” he asked.

  I told him it was part of my landlord ensemble. “I have an evening robe too,” I lied.

  “Comfortable living,” he offered, somewhat gently, though I could sense the hidden barb in the cotton ball. For the first time I noticed that his mustache hairs looked like they were growing into his nostrils and that his nostril hairs looked like they were braiding into his mustache. Mansard gave me his card, touched his hearing aid again, and said, “If you speak to your dad please give him my best.”

  Then he descended the porch steps, his head still tilted slightly to the left.

  Across the street, Hazard Groom was taking a break, leaning on his snow shovel. Plumes of lung smoke escaped his mouth, and his silver racing suit reflected squibs of light.

  Mansard started whistling as he fished for his keys, or maybe it was his hearing aid feeding back. He walked with a hitch. Something to look forward to: arthritis in the winter. I briefly imagined him bowling with my father back in the seventies. Sideburns and turtlenecks and polyester pants. Disco playing over the PA.

  Mansard’s car—a metallic-gray Lincoln—squawked as he engaged the remote to unlock his door.

  Although, as I’ve said, I haven’t seen Sheila Anne in nearly two years, my ex-brother-in-law, Bradley, who was staying with us for a few months before she left, still lives in the street-facing second-floor apartment (Unit 2). For unexplained reasons, Bradley, twenty-two now, had dropped out of the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater and arrived on our doorstep after the first semester of his sophomore year. He’d been wrestling a pretty ferocious weed habit, which, since the acquisition of his sister’s thirty-seven-inch high-definition Sony plasma flat-screen television, has been recently upgraded to Lifestyle status. The flat-screen was de-installed from Sheila Anne’s and my former living room and reinstalled onto his freshly Sheetrocked bedroom wall once he moved into his own unit, roughly a year and a half ago.

  He simply knocked on my door and stated it plainly: “She said I could have the plasma.” As if I were giving him the very stuff of my blood, or my ex-wife’s.

  I didn’t fight him for the TV. It had to be de-anchored from the wall with a special tool that only the guy from Best Buy has, so it cost me a hundred and fifty dollars to have him come to the house, de-mount it from my wall (now the Bunches’ wall), then remount it to the virgin Sheetrock in Bradley’s unit.

  Bradley is one of those handsome, athletic-looking men who, aside from Hacky Sack, Wiffle ball, and occasional stints of skateboarding, has never played a sport in his life. Women seem to descend on him the way crab apples fall out of trees in the late fall, yet he seems only vaguely interested at best. In my opinion it’s not his sexual orientation that accounts for his indifference to women—he seems pretty obviously straight—but rather it’s a kind of general disconnect from the world. This detachment in its most elemental state is plantlike. And like most plants, marijuana included, it is only sunlight and water that he needs, a condition that might be called human photosynthesis. Recently, like me, Bradley has grown a full beard and exists largely in his underwear, though he wears simple V-neck T-shirts and boxer briefs, not long, waffle-patterned double-layered thermals.

  We obviously have more in common than I’d like to admit.

  When he does leave the house he dons a long black trench coat and a navy-blue knit skullcap, as if he’s heading off to work at the docks, though aside from the Blackhawk River, which is a stagnant, sulfuric glorified tributary with a cement promenade featuring an outfit that offers summer paddleboating, a Baskin-Robbins with faulty refrigeration, and a dozen or so vacant, suspicious-looking storefronts, Pollard’s only other body of water is a crappie-stocked man-made lake glutted with Jet Skis and pontoon boats.

  Despite the fact that my ex still pays his rent, Bradley and I seldom speak, and when we do, the conversation is executed with the fewest possible syllables.

  “Hey,” I’ll say, after he opens his door, upon which I was knocking for several minutes.

  “Hey,” he’ll reply in his sleepy baritone.

  “What’s up?” I’ll ask to ease into things.

  “Nothin’ muh.” The words are almost breathed out, a somber little anti-song, the three syllables getting equal exhalation and drone.

  For some reason I feel it necessary to hang on to the thin vestige of familial tissue—however dehydrated by marijuana, baseboard heating, or general male sadness—that connects Bradley and me.

  He’ll say, “She sennit, righ?” Sennit meaning “sent it.” It meaning “the rent.”

  “She sent it,” I’ll confirm for him.

  “Coo,” he’ll say, after a genuinely blank moment, the word sapping one of his few remaining available breaths for the day, his face as vacant as a Tupperware lid. Not “cool”; “coo,” and sincerely uttered, not hipstery, and with absolutely no intent of sounding urban or in any way ebonical. I’m convinced he drops the l out of classic stoner elocutionary fatigue.

  “I just wanted to see how you were doing,” I’ll offer, feeling my blood pressure, which is already low, dropping to match his.

  “Coo,” he’ll say again.

  “You’re good?”

  “Yeah, I’m coo…”

  Then we’ll stand there and stare at each other, the smell of reefer creeping into the hallway, almost manlike in its sharpness, with his sister’s state-of-the-art TV murmuring in the background and Halo’s pause-mode riff looping maddeningly.

  Bradley and Sheila Anne have mouths shaped the same, the upper lip fuller than the lower, perfectly imperfect, and they have the same color eyes, somehow sea-foam green. It pains me to look at him.

  “Heard from your sister?” I’ll finally ask, trying with all my weakened will not to pose this question, but ultimately failing, like some pathetic crystal meth addict breaking down in front of a stranger at the Greyhound station.

  “Other day she tole me to check my e-mail,” he said recently.

  “She called you?”

  “Lef a message.”

  “But you don’t have a computer.”

  “True dat.”

  “Do you even have an e-mail address?”

  “Think so.”

  “You can borrow my laptop anytime,” I offered.

  And he nodded, evidently having exhausted himself of any more verbal energy. And I nodded too. And when the nods decayed to cranial stasis, we just sort of stood there like cows in a field of mud.

  “You have Cheetos in your beard,” I said, or something to that effect.

  And then he mustered one final nod, almost infinitesimal in its movement, and shut the door not quite in my face, and I turned and headed back up to the attic.

  Since he became a leaseholder I’ve seen exactly thirty-two women knock on Bradley’s door, which is just at the landing of the eight stairs that lead up to my attic unit, so it makes it easy to spy. And yes, I count them (I actually keep a tally on a piece of paper that is thumbtacked to a small corkboard over my desk). Both the front and back doors are well secured; you have to be buzzed in to get into the house, which means that most of these girls are waiting around for someone to leave the premises so they can sneak in, likely because Bradley is too lazy to cross the necessary square footage of his apartment to reach his intercom. And because I am by all definitions housebound and beyond Bradley and me there are only four other people living here (well, three now, considering the fact that little Bethany is missing), I imagine this waiting could get exorbitant. I estimate most of the women to be in their twenties. They are all above-average-looking to beautiful, slim, if not blatantly fit, and slightly agitated. The majority of them leave dram
atic notes taped to his door.

  Notes like:

  Bradley, you really hurt my fucking arm…

  Or:

  Thanks for all the lying!

  I have no idea where he meets these women or how he goes about accumulating them. I thought for a while that it might be some sort of personal dating enterprise developed through one of our more mainstream social media platforms—Facebook or Twitter or what have you—but in addition to not owning a computer, Bradley lives without the services of a smartphone. His telephone is of the analog rotary-dial variety. In fact, I’m almost positive that it was a phone I grew up with. So he assembles a stable of women without click, drag, text, post, tweet, or any other missive from the digital world. Which makes his babe magnetism all the more remarkable. Aside from the plasma TV, he is the Luddite Lothario of Pollard, Illinois.

  Bradley owns a silver Toyota Celica with one brown door and a replacement tire. It’s a car he parks in the back of the house, but rarely drives. I’ve seen him mostly getting stoned in the driver’s seat, pulling from a seven-inch, sunburst-orange fiberglass bong, the stereo system playing Bon Iver or Bill Callahan or Sufjan Stevens or some other soul-blighted “In” or recently “Out” Midwestern indie crooner.

  Next to Bradley, in Unit 3, which faces the backyard, whose majestic copper beech is perhaps the property’s greatest natural asset, is Harriet Gumm, a twenty-year-old art student attending Willis Clay whose current project involves nude studies of local middle-aged African-American men. Like Bradley and his stable of women, I have no idea how she finds her subjects or where they come from. Despite its rural profile, Pollard is ethnically diverse, with a surprisingly large African-American population, upwards of something like 27 percent. Lyman, my quietly racist father, always claimed the majority of them were Southern blacks who didn’t have the resources or the will to make it all the way north to Chicago. My mother would shake her head disdainfully, only half-joking that she married a racist.

  “You married a realist,” Lyman would contest, dead serious. “A realist!”