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Angelus · (08-13-2013)

The Gnawing
Part 2: "A Quick One While He's Away"

Back in his motel room, he put through a call to a number in Boston. When a woman answered he said, "Let me talk to him, will you?" It took a few minutes and then he said, "Yeah I got here. It's him, all right. He's calling himself Walt Rivard now. His wife is still going by Sue."

The man in Boston asked when he'd be back.

"What's today, Tuesday? I've got a flight booked Friday, but I might take a little longer. No point rushing things. I found a good place to eat. Mexican joint, and the motel has free HBO. I figure I'll take my time, do it right. Rosenfeld isn't going anywhere."

He had lunch at the Mexican cafe. This time he ordered the combination plate. The waitress asked if he wanted red or green chili.

"Whichever is hotter," he said.

Maybe a mobile home, he thought. You could buy one cheap, a nice double-wide, make a nice starter home for her and her fellow. Or maybe the best thing for both of them was to buy a duplex and rent out half, then rent out the other half when they were ready for something nicer themselves. No time at all you're in real estate, making a nice return, watching your holdings appreciate. No more waiting on tables for her, and pretty soon her husband could quit slaving at the lumber mill, quit worrying about layoffs when the industry hit one of its slumps.

How do you go on, he thought.

He spent the afternoon walking around town. In a gun shop, the proprietor, a man named Teller, took some rifles and shotguns off the wall and let him get the feel of them. A sign on the wall read GUNS DON'T KILL PEOPLE UNLESS YOU AIM REAL GOOD. Anj talked politics with Teller and socioeconomics. It wasn't tricky to figure out his position and adopt it as one's own.

"What I really been meaning to buy," Anj said, "is a handgun."

"You want to protect yourself and your property," Teller said.

"That's the idea."

"And your loved ones."

"Sure."

He let the man sell him a gun. There was, locally, a cooling-off period. You picked out your gun, filled out the form, and four days later you could come back and pick it up.

"You a hothead?" Teller asked him. "You fixing to lean out a car window, bag a state trooper on the way home?"

"It doesn't seem likely."

"Then I'll show you a trick. We just backdate this form and you've already had your cooling-off period. I'd say you look cool enough to me."

"You're a good judge of character."

The man grinned. "This business," he said, "a man's gotta be."

It was nice, a town that size. You got into your car and drove for ten minutes and you were way out in the country.

Anj stopped the Taurus at the side of the road, cut the ignition, rolled down the window. He took the gun from one pocket and the box of shells from the other. The gun -- Teller had kept calling it a weapon -- was a .38 caliber revolver with a two-inch barrel. Teller would have liked to sell him something heavier and more powerful. If Anj had wanted, he probably would have been thrilled to sell him a bazooka.

Anj loaded the gun and got out of the car. There was a beer can lying on its side perhaps twenty yards off. He aimed at it, holding the gun in one hand. A few years ago, maybe more like ten, they started firing two-handed in cop shows on TV, and nowadays that was all you saw, television cops leaping through doorways and spinning around corners, gun gripped rigidly in both hands, held out in front of their bodies like a fire hose. It looked silly. At least Anj thought so. He'd feel self conscious holding a gun like that.

He squeezed the trigger. The gun bucked in his hand, and he missed the beer can by several feet. The report of the gunshot echoed for a long time.

He took aim at other things --at a tree, at a flower, at a white rock the size of a clenched fist. But he couldn't bring himself to fire the gun again and break the stillness with another gunshot. What was the point anyway? If he used the gun, he'd be too close to miss. You got in close, you pointed, you fired. It wasn't rocket science, for god's sake. It wasn't neurosurgery. Anyone could do it.

He replaced the spent cartridge and put the loaded gun in the car's glove compartment. He spilled out the rest of the shells into his hand and walked a few yards from the road's edge, then hurled them with a sweeping sidearm motion. He gave the empty box a toss and got back into the car.

Traveling light, he thought.

Back in town, he drove past the copy center to make sure it was still open. Then, following the route he traced on the map, he found his way to 1411 Aspen Lane, a Dutch Colonial house on the north edge of town. The lawn was neatly trimmed and fiercely green, and there was a bed of rosebushes on either side of the path leading from the sidewalk to the front door.

One of the leaflets in the motel had told how the roses were a local speciality. But the town had been named after an early settler and not the flower itself.

He wondered if Rosenfeld knew that.

He circled the block, parked two doors away on the other side of the street from the Rosenfeld residence. "Rivard, Walter," the white pages had told him. It struck Anj as an unusual alias. He wondered if Rosenfeld had picked it out for himself, or if his wife had suggested it, maybe it was an old family name. Or maybe once upon a time the feds had selected it for him. Who the fuck knows? Probably the latter he decided. "Here's your new name," they would tell you, "and here's how you're going to live and what you're going to be." There was an arbitrariness about it that somehow appealed to Anj, as if they relieved you the burden of the decision. Here's your new name already on it. You like scalloped potatoes in your new life, and you're allergic to bee stings, and your favorite color is gunmetal gray.

Sue Rosenfeld was now Sue Rivard. Anj wondered why her first name had remained the same. Didn't they trust Rosenfeld to get it right? Did they figure him a fool, apt to blurt out "Sue" at an inopportune time? Or was it sheer coincidence or sloppiness on their part?

Around six-thirty the Rosenfelds came home from work. They rode in a Honda Civic. Black. Local plates. They had evidently stopped to get groceries on the way home. Rosenfeld parked in the driveway while his wife got the bag of groceries from the back. Then he put the car in the garage and followed her into the house.

Anj watched the lights go on inside the house. He stayed where he was. It was starting to get dark by the time he drove back to the motel.

On HBO, Anj watched a movie about a gang of criminals who had come to a town in Texas to rob the bank. One of the criminals was a woman, married to one of the other gang members and having an affair with another. Anj thought that was a pretty good recipe for disaster. There was a prolonged shoot-out at the end, with everybody dying in slow motion.

When the movie ended he shut off the TV. His eye caught by the stack of flyers that Rosenfeld had printed out for him. LOST DOG. BLACK LAB. ANSWERS TO DUKE. CALL 555-8282. REWARD.

Excellent watchdog, he thought. Good with children.

He didn't get up until almost noon. He went to the Mexican place and ordered huevos rancheros and put a lot of hot sauce on them. He watched the waitress's hands as she served the food and again when she took his empty plate away. Light glinted off the little diamond. Maybe she and her husband would end up on Aspen Lane, he thought. Not right away, of course. They have to start out in that duplex, but that's what they could aspire to, a Dutch Colonial with the odd pitched roof. What the hell did they call that anyway?

He thought he ought to learn these things. You saw the words, but you didn't know what they meant, saw the houses, but shit, you couldn't describe them properly.

He had bought a paper on his way into the cafe, and now turned to the classified ads and read through the real estate listings. Houses seemed pretty inexpensive. You could actually buy a low-priced home here for twice what what he would have been paid for a fight back in the day.

There was a safety deposit box no one knew about, rented under a name he'd never used for another purpose, and in it he had enough saved from his fighting days to buy a home here for outright cash.

Assuming you could do that. People were always funny about cash, leery of letting themselves be used to launder drug money.

People watched too much fucking TV, he thought.

Anyway, what difference did it make? He wasn't going to live here. The waitress could live here, in a nice little house with an odd pitched roof.

Rosenfeld was leaning over his wife's desk when Anj walked into the copy center. "Why hello," he said. "Have you any luck finding Duke?"

He remembered the name, Anj noticed.

"As a matter of fact," he said, "the dog came back on his own. I guess he wanted the reward."

Sue Rosenfeld laughed.

"You see how fast your flyers worked," he went on. "They brought the dog back before I even got the chance to post them. I'll get some use out of them eventually, though. Old Duke's got itchy feet, he'll take off again one of these days."

"Just so he keeps coming back," she said.

"Reason I stopped by," Anj said, "I'm new in town as you might have gathered, and I've got a business venture I'm getting ready to kick into gear. I'm going to need a printer, I thought maybe we could sit down and talk. You got time for a cup of coffee?"

Rosenfeld's eyes were hard to read behind the glasses. "Sure," he said. "Why not?"

They walked down to the corner, Anj talking about what a nice day it was, Rosenfeld saying little beyond agreeing with him. At the corner, Anj said, "Well, Gary, where should we go for coffee?"

Rosenfeld just froze. Then he said, "I knew."

"I know you did. I could tell the minute I walked in there. How?"

"The phone number on the flyer. I tried it last night. They never heard of a Mr. Peter Lake."

"So you knew last night. Of course you could have made a mistake on the number."

Rosenfeld shook his head. "I wasn't going on memory. I kept an extra copy of the flyer and dialed the number right off of it. No Mr. Lake and no lost dog. Anyway, I think I knew before then. I think I knew the minute you walked in the door."

"Let's get that coffee," Angelus said.

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[Image: tumblr_mop9f7q2uy1r04g55o1_400.gif]

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