Mule (17 page)

He turned and looked out at the field. Everything was quiet, sickening.

Mason held a cigarette out to me from his pack. I watched my shaking fingers take it. He lit it, said, "You gonna tell?"

I couldn't speak.

"James? James? You gonna tell?" He shouted, "What about my family? What about my kid?"

I'd been thinking, Don't panic, don't panic. Now I was thinking, Can I turn him in?

Mason said, "You did this, too."

"No I didn't!"

"You were standing right here. You didn't even try to stop me."

"Stop you?"

We were quiet. Then Mason said, "We have to get them out of here. Someone'll come and find them."

Then he said, "James!"

I shook my head. I said, "How the fuck are we going to get them out of here?"

"In the car."

"We can't put them in the car."

We smoked. I said, "I'm leaving. You're turning yourself in."

"No way."

"I'm not getting in trouble for this. I didn't have anything to do with it."

"Yes, you did!"

In a minute, I said, "Where could we even take them?"

"We'll dump them in a lake."

"What lake?"

We smoked some more. I looked at the moonlight on the plants, then at the moon. I was going to vomit. What could I do? I had to save my life. I opened the door of the car, grabbed one of my phones out of the glove compartment. I called Eric Deveny. What if he didn't answer? What if he did?

Eric Deveny was at a loud party. He said through the phone, "Why you calling so late? You busted?"

"No, no. Nothing like that."

"James?"

"I need your help. I've got a huge fucking mess on my hands."

"Calm down!"

I took a deep breath. "Something happened, Eric. I can't say it on the phone."

Eric was silent. I heard the noise of the party receding as he left it. If he didn't say anything, I had no idea what to do. Then he said, "What happened?"

"The guy who ripped me off? Something went down."

"He do something to you?"

"No, no. The other way around."

"The other way around?"

"It's over."

He was silent. Then he said, "It's over?"

"Yeah."

"What's over?"

"The guy."

"The guy's over?"

"Yeah."

"For real?"

"Yeah, for real. There's two of them."

"Two of them?" He was silent. I couldn't hear the party anymore. Then he said, "Anyone see you?"

"No, nobody saw."

He was quiet for second. He said, "Why didn't you just call me and let me do it?" Then, "Where are you? Can you get the mess here without anyone seeing?"

"I'm in Biloxi. I fucking have to."

"Get it here, I'll help you. It's going to cost you. You're going to have to give that weight to me. Don't come to my house. I'll text you an address. Wait there when you get there, then don't do anything. Don't call this phone again. You'd better not fuck this up."

I grabbed the duffel bag, tossed it in the backseat. My hands became bathed in blood as Mason and I wrestled Russell's heavy body into the trunk. Then we walked out into the cotton field. At first we couldn't find her, had to hunt all around. Could she have gotten away? Then we found her. She was lying face-down in the plants like she was sleeping. But she wasn't sleeping. She was almost weightless when we carried her out of the field. We put her in the trunk on top of Russell, shut the lid on them. Mason handed me the bloody sword. I opened the trunk, averted my eyes, threw it in.

"We have to pick up all these cigarette butts," I said.

We started doing that. Then I said, "Forget it. We have to get out of here."

I drove us back out to the road with the headlights off. I was trembling. "If we get pulled over, you did it. You tell them you were going to kill me, that you made me drive."

"Fine."

I turned on the headlights, drove us back to Biloxi. The baseball bat was beside me; I chucked it out the window on the way. Mason smoked, didn't say anything. When we arrived at his car, he started to climb out. "What are you doing?" I said.

"I can't go with you."

"I can't do this by myself!"

We sat there saying nothing. There was no one around. It was the middle of the night. We couldn't sit there forever. Mason opened the door again. He said, "Please let me go. Please let me go. You know you can do it."

What could I say? I said, "Get the fuck out of my car."

I put the 300 in gear. Then I stopped, powered down the passenger window. I said, "Throw that fucking sword away." I popped the trunk, Mason took out the sword, put it in his car. Then I pulled away. Then I stopped, reversed back. I powered down the window. I said, "You have to let those dogs out. You have to be careful."

"Okay."

"What the fuck is wrong with you? What if I get caught out there?"

I got on the road. Mason had killed two people. There were two dead bodies and weed in my car. I knew I couldn't think of that.

My phone lit up. It was a text, directions. I drove through the night. My mind was in this dead zone. The stripes of the roadway flashed in the headlights and I was the only car on the road. Every inch of the way I knew that my life was at stake.

I found the place at first light. There was a two-car garage on a cement slab in the woods with a big pond beside it. The garage was yellow. No one was there. Crows and starlings were flying around everywhere. There was blood on the steering wheel, dried blood all over my hands, bloody handprints on the dashboard where Mason had touched it. I lay in the backseat of the car with my jacket tight around me, looking at the tops of the pine trees waving in the wind.

Someone rapped on the window and startled me. It was Eric Deveny and his bearded brother. I got out of the car, crammed my hands deep in my jacket pockets. Nearby was Eric's Mercedes, a white utility truck parked beside it. The brother walked to the garage, unlocked the overhead door, and yanked it open. I could see work benches and tools inside. Eric was dressed in white. He said to me, "You all right?"

"No."

"Show me."

I popped open the trunk. Eric looked inside. He bit his knuckle and his eyes lit up. He said, "Holy shit! Hand-to-fucking-hand."

I gave him the duffel bag of weed, which was his payment, and took a walk along the pond. I stared at the trees reflected in the water and wondered if there were any fish in it. Time passed. I heard a generator come to life behind me. Then I heard a Skilsaw start up in the garage. I crouched and washed my hands at the water's edge, walked along, crouched, and washed my face. In the distance I saw Eric in his white clothing striding around the pond toward me, floating like a specter. He was smiling when he reached me, and he said, "You okay?" I shook my head. He asked me, "How much did they take from you?" I said, "Not much."

"Did you do that to them?"

"It wasn't me. It was a guy I work with."

"But were you there?"

"I was there."

"Did you plan it?"

"No."

"Where did it happen?"

"In a cotton field."

"And nobody saw?"

I shook my head.

"If your guy talks, you're fucked," he said. "So maybe you should bring him here, too. Somehow that girl was still breathing. Don't worry, she isn't anymore." He put his arm around me and led me back to the garage. "It's okay. It happens. Give it a couple days. Then don't think about it again."

When we reached the garage, I could see parts of Russell's and LaJane's bodies on the floor, red and meaty where they had been cut by the saw. The 300 was parked outside, dripping because Eric's brother had washed it out with a hose they had.

Eric smiled and said, "You okay to drive?" He laughed and shook his head. "I know what you're feeling, believe me. It's fucking heady, isn't it?"

I got in the car, started it, put it in reverse. Then Eric and his brother trotted up to the window. His brother's clothes were covered in blood like a butcher's. When I powered down the window, they were laughing. Eric's brother was holding something out to me on his bloody palm. It was a tiny curled finger with a red-painted fingernail on it. The brother said, "You want it, dude? You earned it." I was gagging as I reversed past the Mercedes and all the way through the trees to the road.

 

Kate, Romana, and I flew to Rome the next day. It was hot there. Everywhere we went, I saw statues and paintings, and all of the statues and paintings were dead bodies. Kate kept asking me, "What the hell's the matter with you?" and I kept saying, "Nothing" or "I don't feel good, Kate." "Well," she kept saying back, "you're ruining my fucking trip." Kate bought a lot of clothes with the money we'd brought with us in Romana's diaper, and in Milan Kate shopped all day for leather boots, trying on dozens of them in a dozen different stores before buying three pairs. "Why do you need three pairs?" I asked. She said, "It's my trip, isn't it? Mind your own business."

I expected men to come up to me with guns drawn, to knock on the door of our hotel room and arrest me. But nobody came up to me and nobody knocked on our door. After Milan, Kate made me drive us to the Alps, and then to Lake Como. The mountains were beautiful, the lake was beautiful, and for the three days and two nights we had there, I calmed down. As we walked along the lake, Kate asked again and again, "Do you love me?" I answered her every time, "Of course I love you."

I didn't want to go back, and I couldn't go back, and I knew I could not tell Kate. At passport control in D.C., I knew they'd surround me, take me into custody, but the bored immigration officer stamped my passport and said, "Welcome home." When the taxi dropped us off at Siesta Key, our house was waiting for us like we had never left.

I turned on the news. I'd been checking the news every day, many times a day. There was never any news. When I called Mason, he said, "Nothing's happened. Nobody knows. I'm fucking sorry. I'm so fucking sorry. It's all my fault. You didn't have anything to do with it. I shouldn't have made you come. I'm the one who's crazy. I'm the one who has to live with it. Did you tell Kate? Tell me you didn't tell Kate."

I did not want to do this anymore. I e-mailed all the editors I had ever worked with and asked them if they could use any travel articles about Italy. Most of the e-mails bounced back, because those editors had lost their jobs by now. The only one I received read, "Not in the budget. Good luck, sorry."

Five days later, I was parked in the lot outside Mason's apartment building with a duffel bag full of weed. I sat there for a long time. I did not want to go up there, and I did not want to go up there, and I did not want to go up there. And then I went up there. We had a cigarette together on his porch, and he said, "Everyone thinks they ran away together. We weren't the only people they owed money. Nobody is searching for them and nobody knows. I'll understand if you don't want to be my friend anymore."

We had another cigarette. I said, "Did you let those dogs out?"

He said, "Yeah, I carried them out that window and shooed them away."

"Did you take the tags off of them first?"

"Yeah, I took off the tags."

"What did you do with the tags?"

"I threw them away at a gas station."

"What did you do with the sword?"

"I threw it in Lake Pontchartrain."

Then I remembered the ring. I said to him, "What did you do with the ring?"

He dug in his pocket and took it out. He held it up and we looked at it together. He gave it to me and said, "I owe you a ton of money. I'm going to pay you all your money."

"Something is fucking wrong with you, Mason."

"I know, I know. I'm sorry."

"There's no way I can stay here!"

Mason grabbed my arm. "You have to! What would Emma think if you didn't?"

Kate saw me looking at the ring in our kitchen a few days later. She said, "Where did you get that?" I said, "Somebody gave it to me who owed me money." She took it, looked at it, then handed it back to me and said, "It's small. It's ugly. I don't want it. I'll let you buy me a better one to make up for how crappy you were in Europe."

I carried the ring around with me for days because I didn't know what to do with it, didn't want to throw it away. Then Kate and I and the baby were shopping at St. Armand's Circle. All of the stores were having sales because of the economy. Some of the stores were going out of business. I said to Kate, "You sure you want a ring?" Kate said, "Yes." I tossed the dead girl's ring into a garbage can. I bought Kate a nicer one with $4,000 of our drug money.

T
O ANYONE WITH ANY
sense, it was obvious I'd been doing a lot of things wrong from the start. First, I wasn't taking any breaks. But I also wasn't sharing the workload, wasn't doubling up on weight to reduce my risk on the road. It was tricky: being busted with heavier weight would mean more prison time. And yet they couldn't catch you if you weren't behind the wheel. I continued to use the credit card for flights and cars, had from the beginning because I'd imagined I'd be doing it only once. But since I'd opened that Pandora's box, it had become impossible to shut. With the card, I could book the flights online, didn't have to answer any questions, deal with anyone. And the rental car companies wouldn't easily give me a vehicle any other way. To pay in cash, I'd have to register two weeks in advance, hand them all my information, put down a big deposit. I also knew that renting a car with cash could raise suspicions. So wasn't it just safer to keep using the card? It's not like I had any other options anyway: I was leaving behind a long paper trail documenting all my one-way flights to Sacramento, my quick drives home.

I did have a story to cover all of that: I'd been having an affair with Rita, couldn't stand my wife, liked driving back to prolong my time away from her. That I'd been telling my wife I was researching a book I was going to write about everything that was going on right now in the country, to be called
The End of the Golden Dream: Returning East on the American Highway.
I was a journalist in my past life, after all, I'd say to whatever investigators interrogated me in whatever small room they'd shackle me in. Still, I knew it was a ridiculous story.