Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [54]
There’s no accurate predicting, though, of the intensity and range. I had no idea what loco pleasure Larry would indulge in next. He did a brief celebration jig like he’d just made a touchdown with network cameras rolling, and yelled, “Shabazz! Shabazz! Shabazz!…”
I rolled over and lay on my back. The moon was a pale scar in the sky’s star-pocked face. The dewy air was doused with vomit and sweat. I closed my eyes tight, and saw familiar veins like snakes squirm across my eyelids; I smelled charred scrub and singed flesh. When I opened my eyes again, Larry was racing down the rise to where the two corpses lay; he was plucking trophies. He hacked a thumb and a toe off Beth, who didn’t have a head left to ravage, then he straightened her legs into a long, lean uncrossed A, and crouched with his head in its apex.
That’s when I shot him. That’s why I shot him. The why and when of that moment are joined like Siamese twins.
Each of us has two brains, one in the gut and one in the skull. It’s true; I heard it on CNN. My skull-brain must have asked the why the very moment that my gut-brain was shouting the when.
All wisdom is visceral. I know to leave my dead to be discovered by somebody or something else.
I drove Larry’s truck back to the Haight, and parked it in front of the same fire hydrant Larry had. There were no legal spaces left. With Larry’s keys, I let myself into his apartment and helped myself to a few knives and automatic handguns, most of the lock-picking tools, a few of the bugging devices, and all the pills, powders and vials. No breaking and entering. No slipshod signs of petty pilferage. That felt good, but not great enough to make me careless. I slipped Larry’s keys back in the pocket of his windbreaker still hanging from a lopsided peg, and left the bureaucratic business of discovering and reporting Larry’s sudden absence to the landlord and the meter maid.
The three bodies on Beth’s property in Lafayette were discovered by two kids joyriding on crystal meth, but it took them awhile to think of looking for a pay phone and dialing for help. The police chose to be tight-lipped about Larry’s “gardening” equipment, leaving it to barroom detectives to deduce and to local journalists to speculate. Ham identified the bodies of Beth and the woman with the shaved head. He and Jess made the funeral arrangements. I grieved with them in public. In private, I celebrated. The dead women were the same age as Jess. Two stand-ins for Mother down. I was closing in.
Courtesy of a madman, I felt closer than I had to my bio-parents, but Ham, the Mr. Berkeley, aged.
Part Three
The lumpy, quilted envelope addressed to Jess arrived at the agency office eleven days after the death of Beth and Hairless Salome. I cope with the incident in Lafayette because I am careful about how I describe what happened. They died. Not They were killed. Not Larry picked them off the way he must have Cong peasants.
The envelope was delivered by Troy Tran, our stud mailman who sometimes took me karaokeing at the Mint.
“One cent postage due on this baby,” Troy announced. “Don’t you love it that the post office makes the sender pay these days?”
He has a radio announcer’s voice. With his looks and his shoulders, he should be a TV anchorman, but he’s taking acting lessons. It’s the Flash’s fault. The Flash is legend.
“So how come this package got through?”
“Come on, we’re talking one lousy penny. And no sender’s address.”
“You want to collect the lousy penny, Troy?”
“How about a glass of Gatorade instead?”
I was the only one in that morning. Jess was chauffeuring an astronomer with a surprise hit book on his hands, I Winked, the Stars Wobbled. Otherwise it was a slow week even for late January, which I know from Jess is recoup time after the seasonal frenzy of coffee-table books, cookbooks, how-to books for Christmas and Hanukkah gift giving. I had to field a couple