With a low, stressful sound—half growl and half howl—Andy yanks the closet door wide, setting off a chatter of hangers. He crouches, hands up in fists, looking like some ancient sparring partner from the Gym Time Forgot.
“Come outta there, you fucking—”
No one there. Four shirts, one jacket, two ties, and three pairs of pants hanging like dead skin. A battered old suitcase that looks as if it has been kicked through every Greyhound Bus terminal in North America. Nothing else. Not a goddamn th—
But there is. There’s something on the floor beneath the shirts. Several somethings. Almost half a dozen somethings. At first Andy Railsback either doesn’t understand what he’s seeing or doesn’t want to understand. Then it gets through to him, imprints itself on his mind and memory like a hoofprint, and he tries to scream. He can’t. He tries again and nothing comes out but a rusty wheeze from lungs that feel no larger than old prune skins. He tries to turn around and can’t do that, either. He is sure George Potter is coming, and if Potter finds him here, Andy’s life will end. He has seen something George Potter can never allow him to talk about. But he can’t turn. Can’t scream. Can’t take his eyes from the secret in George Potter’s closet.
Can’t move.
Because of the fog, nearly full dark has arrived in French Landing unnaturally early; it’s barely six-thirty. The blurry yellow lights of Maxton Elder Care look like the lights of a cruise ship lying becalmed at sea. In Daisy wing, home of the wonderful Alice Weathers and the far less wonderful Charles Burnside, Pete Wexler and Butch Yerxa have both gone home for the day. A broad-shouldered, peroxide blonde named Vera Hutchinson is now on the desk. In front of her is a book entitled E-Z Minute Crosswords. She is currently puzzling over 6 Across: Garfield, for example. Six letters, first is F, third is L, sixth is E. She hates these tricky ones.
There’s the swoosh of a bathroom door opening. She looks up and sees Charles Burnside come shuffling out of the men’s in his blue robe and a pair of yellow-and-black striped slippers that look like great fuzzy bumblebees. She recognizes them at once.
“Charlie?” she asks, putting her pencil in her crossword book and closing it.
Charlie just goes shuffling along, jaw hanging down, a long runner of drool also hanging down. But he has an unpleasant half grin on his face that Vera doesn’t care for. This one may have lost most of his marbles, but the few left in his head are mean marbles. Sometimes she knows that Charlie Burnside genuinely doesn’t hear her when she speaks (or doesn’t understand her), but she’s positive that sometimes he just pretends not to understand. She has an idea this is one of the latter times.
“Charlie, what are you doing wearing Elmer’s bee slippers? You know his great-granddaughter gave those to him.”
The old man—Burny to us, Charlie to Vera—just goes shuffling along, in a direction that will eventually take him back to D18. Assuming he stays on course, that is.
“Charlie, stop.”
Charlie stops. He stands at the head of Daisy’s corridor like a machine that has been turned off. His jaw hangs. The string of drool snaps, and all at once there’s a little wet spot on the linoleum beside one of those absurd but amusing slippers.
Vera gets up, goes to him, kneels down before him. If she knew what we know, she’d probably be a lot less willing to put her defenseless white neck within reach of those hanging hands, which are twisted by arthritis but still powerful. But of course she does not.
She grasps the left bee slipper. “Lift,” she says.
Charles Burnside lifts his right foot.
“Oh, quit being such a turkey,” she says. “Other one.”
Burny lifts his left foot a little, just enough for her to get the slipper off.
“Now the right one.”
Unseen by Vera, who is looking at his feet, Burny pulls his penis from the fly of his loose pajama pants and pretends to piss on Vera’s bowed head. His grin widens. At the same time, he lifts his right foot and she removes the other slipper. When she looks back up, Burny’s wrinkled old tool is back where it belongs. He considered baptizing her, he really did, but he has created almost enough mischief for one evening. One more little chore and he’ll be off to the land of dreamy dreams. He’s an old monster now. He needs his rest.
“All right,” Vera says. “Want to tell me why one of these is dirtier than the other?” No answer. She hasn’t really expected one. “Okay, beautiful. Back to your room or down to the common room, if you want. There’s microwave popcorn and Jell-O pops tonight, I think. They’re showing The Sound of Music. I’ll see that these slippers get back to where they belong, and you taking them will be our little secret. Take them again and I’ll have to report you, though. Capisce?”
Burny just stands there, vacant . . . but with that nasty little grin lifting his wrinkled old chops. And that light in his eyes. He capisces, all right.
“Go on,” Vera says. “And you better not have dropped a load on the floor in there, you old buzzard.”
Again she expects no reply, but this time she gets one. Burny’s voice is low but perfectly clear. “Keep a civil tongue, you fat bitch, or I’ll eat it right out of your head.”
She recoils as if slapped. Burny stands there with his hands dangling and that little grin on his face.
“Get out of here,” she says. “Or I really will report you.” And a great lot of good that would do. Charlie is one of Maxton’s cash cows, and Vera knows it.
Charlie recommences his slow walk (Pete Wexler has dubbed this particular gait the Old Fucks’ Shuffle), now in his bare feet. Then he turns back. The bleary lamps of his eyes regard her. “The word you’re looking for is feline. Garfield’s a feline. Got it? Stupid cow.”
With that he continues his trip down the corridor. Vera stands where she is, looking at him with her own jaw hanging. She has forgotten all about her crossword puzzle.
In his room, Burny lies down on his bed and slips his hands into the small of his back. From there down he aches like a bugger. Later he will buzz for the fat old bitch, get her to bring him an ibuprofen. For now, though, he has to stay sharp. One more little trick still to do.
“Found you, Potter,” he murmurs. “Good . . . old . . . Potsie.”
Burny hadn’t been shaking doorknobs at all (not that Andy Railsback will ever know this). He had been feeling for the fellow who diddled him out of a sweet little Chicago housing deal back in the late seventies. South Side, home of the White Sox. Blacktown, in other words. Lots of federal money in that one, and several bushels of Illinois dough as well. Enough skim available to last for years, more angles than on a baseball field, but George “Go Fuck Your Mother” Potter had gotten there first, cash had changed hands beneath the proverbial table, and Charles Burnside (or perhaps then he’d still been Carl Bierstone; it’s hard to remember) had been out in the cold.
But Burny has kept track of the thief for lo these many years. (Well, not Burny himself, actually, but as we must by now have realized, this is a man with powerful friends.) Old Potsie—what his friends called him in the days when he still had a few—declared bankruptcy in La Riviere back in the nineties, and lost most of what he still had hidden away during the Great Dot-Com Wreck of Double Aught. But that’s not good enough for Burny. Potsie requires further punishment, and the coincidence of that particular fuckhead washing up in this particular fuckhole of a town is just too good to pass up. Burny’s principal motive—a brainless desire to keep stirring the pot, to make sure bad goes to worse—hasn’t changed, but this will serve that purpose, too.
So he traveled to the Nelson, doing so in a way Jack understands and Judy Marshall has intuited, homing in on Potsie’s room like some ancient bat. And when he sensed Andy Railsback behind him, he was of course delighted. Railsback will save him having to make another anonymous call, and Burny is, in truth, getting tired of doing all their work for them.
Now, back in his room, all comfy-cozy (except for the arthritis, that is), he turns his mind away from George Potter, and begins to Summon.
Looking up into the dark, Charles Burnside’s eyes begin to glow in a distinctly unsettling way. “Gorg,” he says. “Gorg t’eelee. Dinnit a abbalah. Samman Tansy. Samman a montah a Irma. Dinnit a abbalah, Gorg. Dinnit a Ram Abbalah.”