“They asked him some questions,” I said, “but only to get as much information as they could. There was never any question of him doing it, Ros. They were never suspicious of him.”
“Oh, you’re so sure.”
“As a matter of fact, I am. I know some stuff. Lulubelle called her mother from a hotel in eastern Colorado the day she left, and called 283
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her again from Salt Lake City the next day. She was fine then. Those were both weekdays, and L.T. was at the plant. He was at the plant the day they found her car parked off that ranch road near Caliente, as well. Unless he can magically transport himself from place to place in the blink of an eye, he didn’t kill her. Besides, he wouldn’t. He loved her.”
She grunted. It’s this hateful sound of skepticism she makes sometimes. After almost thirty years of marriage, that sound still makes me want to turn on her and yell at her to stop it, to shit or get off the pot, either say what she means or keep quiet. This time I thought about telling her how L.T. had cried; how it had been like there was a cyclone inside of him, tearing loose everything that wasn’t nailed down. I thought about it, but I didn’t. Women don’t trust tears from men.
They may say different, but down deep they don’t trust tears from men.
“Maybe you ought to call the police yourself,” I said. “Offer them a little of your expert help. Point out the stuff they missed, just like Angela Lansbury on Murder, She Wrote. ”
I swung my legs into bed. She turned off the light. We lay there in darkness. When she spoke again, her tone was gentler.
“I don’t like him. That’s all. I don’t, and I never have.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess that’s clear.”
“And I didn’t like the way he looked at Holly.”
Which meant, as I found out eventually, that she hadn’t liked the way Holly looked at him. When she wasn’t looking down at her plate, that is.
“I’d prefer you didn’t ask him back to dinner,” she said.
I kept quiet. It was late. I was tired. It had been a hard day, a harder evening, and I was tired. The last thing I wanted was to have an argument with my wife when I was tired and she was worried.
That’s the sort of argument where one of you ends up spending the night on the couch. And the only way to stop an argument like that is to be quiet. In a marriage, words are like rain. And the land of a marriage is filled with dry washes and arroyos that can become raging rivers in almost the wink of an eye. The therapists believe in talk, 284
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but most of them are either divorced or queer. It’s silence that is a marriage’s best friend.
Silence.
After awhile, my best friend rolled over on her side, away from me and into the place where she goes when she finally gives up the day.
I lay awake a little while longer, thinking of a dusty little car, perhaps once white, parked nose-down in the ditch beside a ranch road out in the Nevada desert not too far from Caliente. The driver’s-side door standing open, the rearview mirror torn off its post and lying on the floor, the front seat sodden with blood and tracked over by the animals that had come in to investigate, perhaps to sample.
There was a man—they assumed he was a man, it almost always is—who had butchered five women out in that part of the world, five in three years, mostly during the time L.T. had been living with Lulubelle. Four of the women were transients. He would get them to stop, somehow, then pull them out of their cars, rape them, dismember them with an axe, leave them a rise or two away for the buz-zards and crows and weasels. The fifth one was an elderly rancher’s wife. The police call this killer the Axe Man. As I write this, the Axe Man has not been captured. Nor has he killed again; if Cynthia Lulubelle Simms DeWitt was the Axe Man’s sixth victim, she was also his last, at least so far. There is still some question, however, as to whether or not she was his sixth victim. If not in most minds, that question exists in the part of L.T.’s mind which is still allowed to hope.
The blood on the seat wasn’t human blood, you see; it didn’t take the Nevada State Forensics Unit five hours to determine that. The ranch hand who found Lulubelle’s Subaru saw a cloud of circling birds half a mile away, and when he reached them, he found not a dismembered woman but a dismembered dog. Little was left but bones and teeth; the predators and scavengers had had their day, and there’s not much meat on a Jack Russell terrier to begin with. The Axe Man most definitely got Frank; Lulubelle’s fate is probable, but far from certain.
Perhaps, I thought, she is alive. Singing “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” at The Jailhouse in Ely or “Take a Message to Michael” at The Rose of 285
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Santa Fe in Hawthorne. Backed up by a three-piece combo. Old men trying to look young in red vests and black string ties. Or maybe she’s blowing GM cowboys in Austin or Wendover—bending forward until her breasts press flat on her thighs beneath a calendar showing tulips in Holland; gripping set after set of flabby buttocks in her hands and thinking about what to watch on TV that night, when her shift is done. Perhaps she just pulled over to the side of the road and walked away. People do that. I know it, and probably you do, too. Sometimes people just say fuck it and walk away. Maybe she left Frank behind, thinking someone would come along and give him a good home, only it was the Axe Man who came along, and . . .
But no. I met Lulubelle, and for the life of me I can’t see her leaving a dog to most likely roast to death or starve to death in the bar-rens. Especially not a dog she loved the way she loved Frank. No, L.T.
hadn’t been exaggerating about that; I saw them together, and I know.
She could still be alive somewhere. Technically speaking, at least, L.T.’s right about that. Just because I can’t think of a scenario that would lead from that car with the door hanging open and the rearview mirror lying on the floor and the dog lying dead and crow-picked two rises away, just because I can’t think of a scenario that would lead from that place near Caliente to some other place where Lulubelle Simms sings or sews or blows truckers, safe and unknown, well, that doesn’t mean that no such scenario exists. As I told L.T., it isn’t as if they found her body; they just found her car, and the remains of the dog a little way from the car. Lulubelle herself could be anywhere. You can see that.
I couldn’t sleep and I felt thirsty. I got out of bed, went into the bathroom, and took the toothbrushes out of the glass we keep by the sink. I filled the glass with water. Then I sat down on the closed lid of the toilet and drank the water and thought about the sound that Siamese cats make, that weird crying, how it must sound good if you love them, how it must sound like coming home.
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The Road Virus
Heads North
I actually have the picture described in this story, how weird is that? My wife saw it and thought I’d like it (or at least react to it), so she gave it to me as a . . . birthday present? Christmas present? I can’t remember. What I can remember is that none of my three kids liked it. I hung it in my office, and they claimed the driver’s eyes followed them as they crossed the room (as a very small boy, my son Owen was similarly freaked by a picture of Jim Morrison). I like stories about pictures that change, and finally I wrote this one about my picture. The only other time I can remember being inspired to write a story based on an actual picture was “The House on Maple Street,” based on a black-and-white drawing by Chris Van Allsburg. That story is in Nightmares and Dreamscapes . I also wrote a novel about a picture that changes. It’s called Rose Madder , and is probably the best read of my novels (no movie, either). In that story, the Road Virus is named Norman.
Richard Kinnell wasn’t frightened when he first saw the picture at the yard sale in Rosewood.