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  He left her there and walked back out into the hallway, then up it to the last door off of it. The door opened into a shiny, tiled bathroom with twin toilets, twin sinks, a Jacuzzi, a steam room, a shower, a full-length mirror into which Rankin peered into the dark, frightening eyes of a masked man caked in blood.

  The gnawing in his gut worsening; his mind seeing those handprints on the woman’s neck, the bruises on her chest, her standing naked and covered in her own piss over that crib, staring vacantly into it, whispering as if from a thousand miles away, “there isn’t one.”

  He stripped himself of everything but the ski mask.

  Charlie Rankin’s wiry prison muscles, gained from performing countless push-ups and sit-ups; the keloid scar running half the length of his right arm, the result of some son of a bitch (not even a son of a bitch who’d lived with them, but a twenty-dollar john who’d become enraged at Charlie’s mother for not getting from her what he thought he’d paid for and had rushed out of the room he’d not been getting it in into the room where Charlie was watching TV) twisting the arm until Charlie’s humerus bone spirally fractured end to end; lash scars on his back and buttocks, a few left by the half-Indian, most of the rest by Chester Rhimes, the others by a son of a bitch he’d been too young to remember past a faceless man inflicting pain; burn marks on his chest where Chester Rhimes had put out a few of his cigarettes; a mottled patch of scar tissue on one side of his neck, evidence of where Chester Rhimes had emptied a bowl of boiling soup not to his taste; his sprinter’s legs, muscular and tapered, always ready to run; his dick and balls, an accursed weight between them, growing heavier to him with the years.

  The reflected eyes before him refusing to meet his stare, giving the impression of looking through or past him, as if his ski mask contained only thin air, as if the eyes were engaging someone standing behind him.

  He turned away from them.

  His back to the mirror, he removed the mask. He saw in his mind Litde Charlie’s face, corpse-white, dead as a shed fingernail. The thing wanting out of him (it felt like a ball growing bigger) moved into the base of his throat. With a herculean effort he swallowed hard against it, sending it back deep into his gut.

  He stepped into the shower and turned it on.

  * * *

  The blood he washed from his body mostly didn’t belong to him; his only visible wounds turned out to be minor facial and forearm scratches, on both sides of his nose small gashes (almost like tooth marks) he had no recollection of receiving, a tender blackand-blue bruise marring his lower back; he directed, in a bent-over posture, a hot jet of water at the spot. The pain radiating from the area lessened. In a few minutes, he found he could nearly touch his toes.

  He reminded himself that Charlie Rankin, with all the tight places he’d been in, was still in the deal.

  He located in a cabinet beneath one of the sinks a Band-Aid, which he applied to his nose injury. Naked, he proceeded down the hallway to the laundry room; from clean clothes piled in baskets near the dryer, he selected and put on men’s briefs, socks, khaki pants, a long-sleeved polo shirt, and a wool sweater (everything fit him as if it had been bought for him). With a duffel bag that had been laying atop the dryer, he returned to the bathroom. He stuffed his soiled clothing in the bag. He put his wallet, knife, and the Mazda’s keys in his pants pockets, slid the .38 into his waistband, pulled back on and laced up his boots.

  Looking in the mirror to see if he could pass for some golf-club guy, he decided he could as well as anyone could and that if he’d come into the world a little luckier he might have lived in this house, together with the woman in the other room. He tried imagining a life here with her, what they would talk about, etc. “How was your day, dear?”, he mouthed, finding himself to be a mute still, and understanding in a flash Charlie Rankin couldn’t, in a million lifetimes, have lived here or passed for anyone who did.

  He rinsed the blood from the ski mask.

  He rung out the mask, picturing again (or else he’d not stopped picturing it since he’d seen it) that blue-and-white, chewed-on fish, and the dark-green ones chasing it; he saw the mangled fish going round and round, with each bite one of the sons of bitches took from it becoming more disfigured and smaller until it disappeared completely, and, then, its specter swimming through eternity away from the memory of those fucking teeth snapping at it.

  He yanked the mask onto his head, then down over his face.

  A sensation like, uh huh, see ya around.

  He reentered the hallway, dropped his bagged clothes near the door behind which he’d left the woman, continued down the corridor, stepped into the room containing the fish tank, and switched on the ceiling light.

  “Hello, wiseguy.”

  The parrot winged past him and out the doorway, as Rankin walked to the tank.

  Peering through the aquarium’s front pane he counted, by pointing at them, six dark-green fish, each at least as long as his hand, dogging still the blue-and-white one, which he judged to have been further physically diminished since even his last look at it. He seized from a shelf under the tank a small, metal-handled net, plunged it into the water, and scooped up the first fish in the single file line of dark-green fish. He took the fish from the net, lay it on the floor at his feet, then captured and placed aside it the next one in line, and so on, until all six of them were flopping around beneath him. Watching them twisting and gasping for air, he suddenly recalled Chester Rhimes’s face as Little Charlie’s hands strangled the life out of Rhimes. He looked back into the tank at the blue-and-white fish and saw it still swimming circles, as if it had no idea the sons of bitches had left off chasing it. He felt like crying or pushing over the tank. Instead, he left the dark-green fish dying on the floor and returned to the woman.

  * * *

  Seeing him in the guy’s clothes she widened her eyes at him a second, before, exhaling a distressed, airy sound, she squeezed them shut. Then her eyes reopened and looked at him in the way they’d been looking at him ever since he’d come to and stopped himself from killing her; as if he might be a dead leaf, a blank wall, a curl of dogshit.

  A powerful longing hit Rankin that she like him. He thought, if he could let her know him, the real him, who’d never shot a deer or squirrel even. If he could get her to see it had no more been him strangling her than it had been Florence in that movie screwing a priest and a nun. He smiled to her.

  Her frightened expression indicated to him she saw him, instead of smiling to her, leering, grinning lasciviously at her. He made the smile less toothy.

  She rolled her head away from him.

  Rankin comprehended that to her he could be anything, could be less than human, could be a monster, like Frankenstein. To not be afraid of him, she needed to look at him, to see HIM—his curly black hair, his boyish features (angelic, Buddha called them), his cheeks so smooth Buddha said touching them was like touching a baby’s cheeks (and if she touched them would she think so too and recognize in him the Charlie Rankin who’d cried as recently as he’d learned of his dog’s death?)— because who wouldn’t be afraid of a figure in a mask?

  He sat down near her head on the loveseat; on the skin to one side of her mouth he placed a thumb, on the other side the index finger of his same hand.

  An eerie whistling from her nostrils; her pale lips trembling; her light-blue eyes, flecked with green, angling at him as warily as a kicked-dog’s eyes at who’d kicked it.

  Little Charlie breaking into an unoccupied house and instead of stealing anything from it methodically taking and crushing under his foot, one piece at a time, every dish, glass, candle holder, and trinket from the home’s built-in china cabinet.

  He turned the woman’s face toward him; with slight pressure from his fingers he caused her to look up at him.

  The dark bruises on her neck exaggerating the death mask color of her skin, her piquant urine odor mixing with her perfumed stench, her eyes, in their blankness suggesting shut off spigots, made him feel as horr
ible for her as if he were her; he wanted to comfort her, to comfort himself, as Little Charlie’s mother had sometimes, when no son of a bitch was around, comforted him. He put his fingers in her hair (Buddha always telling him his touch was worth more than all his words combined), dirty-blonde hair as silky soft as had been his mother’s; cut to just above the woman’s collar line, it brushed pleasantly his palm as he stroked it. If he could disappear into this sensation, he thought, if he could, anyway, hide in it for a while from an oppressed feeling that a blunt, heavy object poised over his head would at any moment be thrust downward, a feeling going back as far as did his memory.

  As he brushed the hair back from them, her ears, in their delicateness, brought to his mind the sort of handmade chocolates sold singularly in sweet-smelling stores he could afford only to sniff in.

  His mother slipping unclothed into his bed (always when it was just the two of them) and making him feel for those few tingling seconds safe, making him feel loved.

  “Please stop.”

  Rankin gazed down at the woman. She looked terrified. “You don’t need to hurt me, I can’t—won’t—fight you”—her voice like words from a distant radio station amid a storm. Rankin, in horror, understood she believed he had in mind to get on top of her and into her, to make her move beneath him in the way Little Charlie’s mother had taught him to move beneath her. With the odd sensation he’d been tricked into gripping and pulling on it as he now was, he released her hair, then brought his hand up to remove his mask, to show her not a bad man’s face, but Charlie Rankin’s face.

  “Don’t!” hissed the woman, frantically shaking her head, as if she contemplated him being too deformed to look at. In the same instant her eyes, for the first time, seemed to Rankin to be trying to find him behind the mask. “I don’t think you want to kill me or you would have done it earlier.” Rankin could tell talking hurt her; listening to her, he had the impression her words were solid objects being pulled through an opening smaller than them; even while recognizing her pain, he couldn’t relate it to anything he, Charlie Rankin sitting over her, had done. “And if you show me what you look like, you might decide you’ll have to do it—even if you don’t want to—so that I can’t identify you later.”

  Rankin, coming back to his senses (it felt to him almost as if he’d reentered the room after having left it for an indeterminate lapse) understood that he’d nearly made a terrible mistake, that he’d been stopped from making it only by the woman. He had the sensation she’d somehow (maybe through the smile he’d given her) divulged, without seeing him straight on, Charlie Rankin who couldn’t kill a deer. From a clock above them a chime rang, signaling 1:00 a.m.; the sound had the effect of returning him entirely to his present circumstances and immediate need to get the hell gone from there.

  He pictured Buddha, tapping the side of his balding head, saying, “Think.”

  Dropping his hand from his face, he abruptly stood up.

  Even with his back feeling some better, retracing his steps to the Mazda struck him as a bad idea, if only for the length of the trek and how long it would take him to make it. He extended his hands before him over the woman, and pantomimed steering a car. “You’re showing me yourself driving,” the woman whispered.

  Rankin waved broadly at the wall, to indicate the space beyond it.

  “Driving away from here? You’re going to leave now?”

  Rankin, nodding, stopped waving. He pointed to the woman.

  “No, please”—her eyes again looking at him as they had when he’d had his fingers in her hair, as if she were searching for the flesh and blood under his mask—”you don’t need to take me with you. I’m no danger to you—I can’t hurt you—I haven’t seen you ...”

  Rankin shook his head impatiently at her. Then he made as if to snatch from her a key, put it into an ignition, and turn the key.

  “What?” she said. “You want to leave in a car of mine— ours— the one in the driveway?”

  Rankin nodded.

  “You’ll go alone”—Rankin felt the woman’s eyes seeking like fingers at the end of outstretched arms to get completely under his mask, to find him, to touch the flesh of Charlie Rankin—”I mean, you’ll leave me here—like this—if I tell you where the keys are? “

  Rankin only kept staring at her.

  “They’re on a hook just inside the kitchen doorway,” she whispered hoarsely, “on the other side of the big room, at the head of the corridor.”

  Rankin was sorry for her that he didn’t dare take time to let her shower and clean up, that when she was found she’d look and smell as bad as she did. He eased her restraints to prevent them from digging into her wrists and ankles and so that she would be able, he hoped, to eventually free herself. A strong want to know before he left why it was there, and where was the baby that belonged in it, led him to look once more in the crib, then back at the woman; a change seemed to him to have come over her during the second he’d glanced away from her; in her face he now saw haughtiness, an assuredness that their roles had been reversed, that, even tied up, she now held the upper hand over him. She hissed to him in her tortured voice, “It’s got a full tank of gas.”

  Rankin suddenly feared those eyes of hers had seen too much, that she’d recognize him in the future, that, if this was the last time she saw him, she’d remember forever what she’d learned of Charlie Rankin.

  Buddha telling him to be smart, to be a clam, to be a ghost.

  Little Charlie thinking that if he shut for good those eyes (Chester Rhimes’s and his mother’s eyes) they’d never find him again.

  * * *

  He found himself walking up the corridor, his bag of clothes under his arm; he heard, coming from the room where he’d left them, the dark-green fish still flopping around (the sound fainter than it had been); in the hallway past the kitchen, the fluttering of what he took for the parrot’s wings; from his footsteps as he crossed the big room, a creaking that seemed excessive in such a well kept house. Off the floor he picked up and put into his pants pocket a variety of unshelled nuts. Three times, the last while leaving the premises, he stepped over or around the dead guy, not looking at him, not seeing him at all.

  The sleet had quit. The air had warmed some. A mist, so thick in places parts of him disappeared to himself in it, had infiltrated the night. For all he heard of the jackass, it might’ve died in the preceding hours or never existed. He left the Saab behind the storage shed, near where he’d parked the Mazda. At an all night service center on the highway outside of Willimette he dropped into a dumpster the duffel bag holding his bloodied clothes, the ski mask, the .38, and his gloves; he got back into the Mazda, drove it back to where he’d stolen it from, left it as he’d found it, and hiked back to Florence’s, where her apartment was yet unlocked and her still asleep before the television that now displayed a solid blue screen.

  Intending only to get his money and leave, he felt, standing over Florence, incapable of further activity; at the same time he had the sensation that not all of him was there, as if he was but a small piece of Charlie Rankin, who’d been blown apart and scattered in several directions. He sat down at the end of the couch farthest from Florence’s head. He picked up her feet. He put them into his lap. He remembered her pointing down that afternoon, with a fateful smile, at her snakeskin boots over her freezing toes. He commenced rubbing her toes in the way that he’d left off doing hours earlier.

  PART TWO

  “I guessed you wouldn’t be able to stay away,” she said at him out of a thin smoke cloud in the livingroom doorway. “That you’d recognized the connection between us, same as me.”

  Rankin wondered how long she’d been standing there, watching him. He got an uneasy feeling, as if he’d waken to find himself under an X-ray machine. He peeked beneath the blanket over him.

  He had on only underpants; a clear salve coated his wrists and forearms.

  “Those scratches needed tending to.” She dragged down to its filter a cigarette, n
ever touching it with anything but her lips. A female singer’s voice oozed softly as a fan’s hum from speakers left and right of her. “And it’s not hygienic to sleep in the clothes you walk around in.”

  Rankin, wincing from a tightness in his back, pushed himself into a sitting position. He picked up from between the couch cushions the remote. He flicked on the television. A crater-faced weatherman waved his right arm in a big circle before an aerial map showing clear blue skies.

  Walking into the room, Florence said, “You slept through breakfast.”

  The weatherman sang in a little kid’s voice, “Sun, sun, beautiful sun—!”

  Florence leaned down at the set and changed the channel; the one she switched to showed a big-haired woman giving live psychic readings over the phone. “And lunch too.”

  Surprised, without knowing why, his voice was audible, Rankin said, “Eating ought to just be called eating and people free to do it whenever.”

  “All you ex-cons, I bet, say that.”

  “Was a rule in there for everything—when to eat, when to shut your eyes, when to open ‘em. Without ‘em it wouldn’t a been so bad.”

  Florence scrunched out her smoke in an ashtray on the coffee table. “Without ‘em it wouldn’t a been jail.” She touched a finger to his lower back. “This where it hurts you most?”

  “Who says anything hurts me?”

  “Pain’s written all over you.”

  Rankin backed away from her.

  With the first two fingers of her right hand Florence snipped, scissors-like, at the air over his scalp. “You afraid I’ll cut off your hair, Samson, make you into a weakling?”

  Rankin didn’t reply. He tightened the blanket around himself.

  “I wasn’t, you know, in so many of them porno movies.”

  Rankin shrugged.