“Please watch your language, sir,” said Mike automatically. “Now … may I see your left forearm?”
The man, Andrew Duncan, swore again and thrust out his arm. His sleeve was rolled up and he rotated his forearm so Mike could see the pale skin above his wristwatch. There was no tattoo.
But there was … something.
Mike bent closer. “Is that a scar?”
“Of course it’s a scar,” hissed Corinne. “He had it removed. Burned off with lasers or however they do it.”
“It’s not a scar because I never had a tattoo,” insisted Andrew.
“It does appear to be a scar of some kind,” said Mike, and he could feel himself shifting to take sides. There was something on the husband’s arm. It was small, about the size of a thumbprint, but faded, almost smeared, the way a watercolor looks after it’s been soaked. Mike could see no trace of any specific pattern, and certainly not the pink ribbon emblem of breast cancer or the black ink of the two dates when Corinne was declared cancer-free. All he could make out was a faintness of pink and gray, but the effect was of a scar that was so old it had nearly vanished.
“It’s been there for six years,” said Corinne and now tears were rolling down her cheeks. A fly buzzed around her face and she slapped it away in irritation.
It was drizzling, with the droplets moving in misty waves as storm winds came sweeping along the road. The clouds promised much heavier rain, and soon. A tow truck had arrived during the narration and the driver was busy hooking the Kia to the tow-bar, throwing frequent looks at the sky.
The story was a strange one. While they were driving, Corinne remarked that tomorrow was the sixth anniversary of the call from the oncologist to tell her that she was cancer-free. It was a big thing, because this time they were sure they’d gotten it all. After the first bout, the cancer had crept back in and was more aggressive by the time it was discovered. But the partial mastectomy, the radiation, and the chemo had done the job. Andrew had gotten the ribbon tattoo with the date of her first all-clear the day she got the first good news, and had added the second date two days after the next remission. The tattoo was small and generally covered by his sleeve, but since it was Andrew’s habit to wear his wristwatch with the face on the inside, he’d chosen the placement so that whenever he checked his watch he would see it. See, and be reminded of the blessing of healing.
While they were driving, however, after Corinne made her comment about the anniversary, she asked to see the tattoo. Andrew had looked at her, frowned, half smiled, and asked, “What tattoo?”
She thought he was making some kind of joke, but when she pressed him on it, Andrew thought she was making a weird and ugly joke. He asked, “What cancer? What are you even talking about?”
They went back and forth like a bad comedy act, and that disintegrated into accusations, yelling, and finally she started crying hysterically and slapping at him. At his bare wrist. He tried fending her off, pulling his arm out of reach, and when she leaned over to try for another smack, there was the cow.
Mike had all the details but none of the story made sense, unless Andrew was a lying piece of shit. And a seriously cruel lying piece of shit at that.
There was more thunder and the rain began falling in earnest.
“Mrs. Duncan,” he said, “I’m going to let the EMTs take your husband to the hospital. Pinelands Regional Medical Center is in town. They’re going to want to take some tests and maybe an X-ray and a CT scan.”
“They should test him to see if he has a fucking heart,” she said, trying to make it sound bitter, but it came out broken and sad.
Which is when Andrew Duncan, looking genuinely confused, started crying.
The EMTs put him on the gurney, strapped him into the back brace, and were about to close the door, when Corinne suddenly climbed inside. She wrapped her arms around her lying piece of shit husband, and they both disintegrated into truly awful tears. The EMTs gave Mike puzzled looks. He returned a meaningless nod and stepped back as they drove off, siren wailing like a despairing ghost. The tow truck followed.
Mike stood in the rain, watching them go. The storm intensified so quickly that the ambulance vanished from sight before it even topped the hill. Wind gusts slanted the rain like scythes, but Mike ignored it. Rain didn’t bother him. He had other things on his mind.
Then he turned to the cow. She had been munching roadside grass, not looking hurt or even bothered by the collision with the SUV. But as he began walking over, the cow gave a last moo and fell over. Dead as a stone.
“Ah … fuck…” breathed Mike. He squatted down, letting the rain soak him to the skin, as he stroked the cow’s cheek and neck.
INTERLUDE ONE
THE LORD OF THE FLIES
His name was Owen Minor, and life was never kind to him.
He saw no reason to be kind in return.
Some lives are like that. It’s a roll of the cosmic dice, and as Owen always saw it, those dice were loaded. He was born too early and born wrong. That’s how his mother described it when she complained to one of her friends, and she complained a lot.
“Carrying him was awful,” she said once to a girlfriend while they were drinking at the kitchen table. His mom thought Owen was upstairs asleep, but he’d crept downstairs to listen. As he often did. “Bad enough the condom broke. Or it had a hole. Or some damn thing. Thought I was doing the whole safe sex thing—and it’s not like the son of a bitch I was banging was the great prize of all time. Sure, he had a pretty face. Like Brad Pitt, if someone had taken a ball-peen hammer to his face. Good body, though. Biggest cock you ever saw on a white man. Maybe that was it. Even those—what do you call ’em? Magnums?—are a size too small for that kind of meat.”
Owen knelt in the shadows of the adjoining dining room, in a niche between the china cabinet and a stack of boxes filled with old issues of National Geographic, Soap Opera Digest, and Entertainment Weekly. He shivered there in the darkness, even though the house was warm.
“So, anyway,” continued his mother, her words a little slurred from the combination of white zinfandel and hits of Godfather OG, which she chain-smoked, filling the whole house with the skunk stink of ultrapotent marijuana, “he banged me cross-eyed right here on this table. Hand to God, Gracie. I didn’t even know the rubber broke and I didn’t give a damn.”
The laughter was shrill. Like jackals Owen had seen at the zoo.
“Anyway, he went off to Afghanistan about two weeks later and got killed.”
“The Taliban get him?” asked Gracie.
“Nah. Got his stupid ass run over by a truck. No great loss of a person, but a real waste of a good dick.”
More laughter. Then the scalding steam hiss as one or the other of them took a deep hit on the joint.
“So, here’s me with a bun in the oven. Try to explain that to a husband who hasn’t had a stiff dick since Clinton was president. Fucker beat the shit out of me. I threw him out and filed a paper on him, but damn if he wouldn’t have earned a little bit of thanks if he’d hit me in the guts instead of the mouth. One miscarriage and a lot of things would have been better, you know?”
“I heard that,” agreed Gracie. “Heard it was a bad pregnancy…?”