Chapter One

        I didn’t move to Bayeux, Texas to be chained to a police scanner and squeeze sour drops from the eyes of grieving mothers

        "I’m very sorry to trouble you ma’am, but I was hoping you could tell me a little about your daughter. So that she’s more than just a headline and a few sentences. I really want people to know what kind of person she was, to put a face to drinking and driving and help her make people really think about what they’re doing."

        It’s hard to fake sincerity after the first year, but they almost always talked anyway.

        I moved across the state, from desert to wetlands, to write features. Flowery pieces for what once would have been called the newspaper’s "women’s section" about a third generation mountain dulcimer craftsman; the eighty-year-old Franciscan who still polishes the bell at the downtown basilica; the trio of lonesome widows who mask their pain and feelings of obsolescence by dressing up in red hats and purple dresses once a week.

        I wanted to slather words across the page, forming portraits of the brass-balled men and bolder women who choose to remain in a region smothered by refinery fumes, swept away only occasionally by fierce hurricane winds, because their families have lived here for generations and they couldn’t conceive of trading comfort and safety for a home barren of the blood and spirits of their ancestors.

        I spent most of my time those first few months, before I was transferred to the cop beat, talking to and writing profiles about Bayeux’s elders. I had discovered young people in Bayeux were like young people the world over. A franchise restaurant generation, they were all composed of the same quality-controlled, mass-media produced ingredients: through overexposure to the same television shows, pop music, department-store dictated fashion and celebrity-saturated cultural points of reference they were all equally attractive and repulsive, and of little interest to me as a writer.  

        The paper’s brass didn’t agree, and urged me to focus my features on a market that would never read them. It didn’t matter that old people are the only people that buy newspapers. It didn’t matter after a couple months that my voice-mail filled daily with gushing, stammered sentimental praise from the characters I sketched and the people who had never known them so fully before. What mattered was what was that we reach a newer, younger audience, one that didn’t want to read about grandma’s Depression-era recipe book, or grandpa’s collection of letters written to and received from world leaders and historic icons.

        The pieces about the younger generation that I wrote, my generation, they wouldn’t print without first sterilizing them. Grandma didn’t want to hear about the high school valedictorian who, for her 18th birthday, got a tattoo stamp that read Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate, scrawled above her ass. Grandpa didn’t want to read about his grandson’s hash harrier club, a fraternity of runners who meet weekly to pursue the designated “hare” down an improvised chalk line to a bar where they would reward their quarry’s escape with a series of shots, or punish his failure with much more of the same.

        My pitch to track a particular clap strain from the Houston nightclub where it was passed in the parking lot to a Bayeux coed on her 21st birthday, up and down the strata of society, was met with praise and laughter, but also rejection and a stern warning when I followed through on what they deemed a joke with what I still consider an amazing piece of copy.

        After I’d been with the paper for about three months they cut the features section from eight pages to four, cut its staff in half and transferred me over to replace a cops reporter who had decided that by joining the ranks of those he’d covered for the past two years his life might be a little less safe, but his job would be much more secure.

        Bayeux was not, I learned, the peaceful, sunny, Gulf Coast town the sleepy elders I’d spent so much time with still imagined it to be. The last hurricane had driven the most vicious New Orleans residents west, bloodthirsty pioneers ambitious only in their desire to claim new turf. While the most adept members of the criminal diaspora settled in Houston, their less competent counterparts stopped in Bayeux and neighboring Port Le Fleur where they discovered that although they were small fish, this area was a very small pond and it took much less effort to elbow their way in here than into the nation’s fourth-largest city where the people they pushed shoved back with small arms fire.

        My first night as the night-time cops reporter there were two shootings and a stabbing in Port Le Fleur, none fatal, as well as suspicious fire at an out-of-business laundromat and a near-riot at a biker bar known as a hub for the meth trade. It was a slow night.

        My wife, Kathy, waited up for me that first night, eager for the first time in my five-year career to hear about my day. She had always been a crime junkie, hooked on dense, detailed true crime novels and CrimeTV marathons, and I’m in awe to this day that she married me and not the clean-cut police cadet she’d split her limited free time with back in San Pedro when we first started dating.

        I was capable of extracting the grotesque from even the most mundane incidents. His sensitivity, which would make him a good cop, would make him a lousy storyteller, unwilling or unable to drill into the heart of the horrors he witnessed, refine the crude that poured out and fuel others’ imaginations with it, which I, as a cops reporter, was obligated to do.

        I have never been any more eager to share what’s worst in the world than to share what’s best, although I recognize that sorrow sells better than sap. But I have long suffered from periodic bouts of numbness that made it simple for me to tap into tragedy. There was something similar in Kathy, some impurity imparted to her through early and prolonged suffering, that made the world most real to her when exposed to its most abrasive qualities. When things seemed safe, calm and pleasant she was at her most alert, as if there were a certain daily quota for misery that if not yet met meant she may have to help meet it. Stories about others’ suffering did not please her as it would a sadist. She was a sweet woman, but it somehow relieved her when the world operated in the manner that it always had.  

        I met her while she was working as a traveling trauma nurse performing a three-month stint at a hospital near San Pedro, where I had recently started as a general assignment reporter for the weekly paper, my first real job in journalism. I bumped into her after my third gin and tonic near the bar, where she’d just picked up a strawberry margarita. The drink was jostled by the collision and its contents splashed across the white, chiffon dress she wore.

        I winced, reflexively, expecting her to deck me or grab a nearby beer bottle, smash it over the bar and make a matching stain in the middle of the tasteless white t-shirt, If you can still read this, let me buy you another round in small, blurry print, I was wearing. She laughed and assured me it was alright.

        "I’ve always wanted to be Carrie," she said. "Not so much for the pig’s blood, but the ability to rip people apart with my mind."

        I offered to buy her another drink. We sat outside on the patio, smoking and chatting first about our favorite horror novels, then about some of the true-life atrocities we’d heard about or witnessed first-hand.  

        "You hear a lot of stories from the other nurses when you travel around," she told me. "Really awful stuff, not something that they saw, but that a friend of a friend saw, urban legends, really. Like the man who came in complaining that he’d been bitten by a rat nesting in his wife’s vagina, only to discover after she was examined that she’d left a syringe in there that she’d hidden during a traffic stop. Or about the old drunk who kept trying to take his contact lenses out and ended up shredding his corneas because he’d already taken the lenses out and forgotten. And the tweaker who turned his nose into shredded beef after snorting a line of chili powder."

        "So it’s not as bad as all that?" I asked.

        "Worse," she said, dipping a finger into her drink and sucking the red slush off the tip.

        "So what have you seen, firsthand? What’s the worst?"

        "As far as disturbing shit, the teratoma."

        "What’s that?"

        Kathy hovered over her drink, then clutched her chest as the cold stabbed at her chest and slid the empty glass toward me. I paid over $10 for the refill it cost me for her story.

"I was working in the e.r. in a suburb north of Chicago a few years ago when there was a young girl brought in late one night, beautiful, beautiful girl, she’d been getting ready to go to some kind of dance, prom or whatever I guess, when she started feeling this intense pain in her abdomen," Kathy said after I returned with her bloody offering. "They figured her appendix was about to blow and had to rip her open. There was this... thing... inside her. A teratoma; it’s a kind of tumor. Tissues start forming in places where they shouldn’t, like bits of hair, or little teeth."

        "Shut up," I said.

        "It’s absolutely true," she insisted. "Happens more than you’d think. A lot of the time they’re benign, so you could have one inside you right now, a little ball of hair and teeth. But this was worse. I’d seen that once or twice before, and it’s disgusting, but this was worse. In the middle of what looked like a chunk of General Tso’s chicken there was an eye. A fucking eye had grown in the tumor. And, I swear to God this is true..."

        "What?"

        "It winked."

        Later that night, filled with as much laughter as lust, I paused for a moment in bed as our eyes caught and things suddenly became more than just near-strangers sharing a single night of forgettable fun. I winked at her, and while she pummeled me, screaming with laughter, that must be when she fell in love.

        I don’t know when I first fell in love with her, probably over a cup of coffee as we nursed hangovers a few weeks later, but I do recall when I fell in love with her all over again. It was a few weeks after I’d started working the cop beat, a Sunday morning.

        We were going for a walk around a cattail marsh hidden in the back of a municipal park. A sign on the chain link fence that surrounds the 900-acre wetland warned that the alligators were prevalent.

        "Excellent," she said. "I’ve been looking for the perfect place to dump a body."

        "You have a lot of bodies that need getting rid of, huh?"

        "Oh, yeah. They’re piling up. I can’t even open up the hall closet anymore without a couple drifters spilling out."

        "I was wondering what’s been stinking up the place."

        "That would be your feet, hon. When you came home from racquetball last week and took your socks off there were actual stink lines coming off them, honest to God, little green wavy lines."

        We walked around the dusty path that winds through the marsh for an hour, ripping into each other, laughing, holding hands, stopping every few minutes to marvel at the wilderness that had swallowed us, awed that inside the city such seclusion could exist. No cars, no buildings, no people. Only bulrushes, cattails- penis plants, as Kathy called them- lily-pads and thousands of birds. Ducks and herons, seagulls, swans and swarms of swallows, pelicans and dozens of species I couldn’t identify. Somewhere in the middle of our walk we stopped to watch as a flock of egrets exploded out of a dense growth of reeds.

        Kathy seized my hand as great, white birds passed through distant pines and I kissed her. The emptiness I had been feeling was filled with the poetry of the place, and I was overcome by the joy of sharing it with her. We made love on moist marsh grass, frightening away half the birds with our vocal declarations of desire. When we were finished, as we lay in each other’s arms indifferent to the muck clinging to our flesh, I whispered that I loved her and the sincerity hit her eyes like pepper spray.

        

        The next day I slipped into work a little after lunch-time with the opposite of a hangover. Bloodshot eyes and sour-mash breath wouldn’t elicit any sort of response from my co-workers or bosses, but the smile on my face drew their notice, probably convincing them I’d been hit with Bell’s palsy during a lap-dance, which was the explanation I’d have given if asked. It was the first time they’d seen me smile at work.

        My city editor, Bill Politzki, approached me before I had time to drain even half a cup of my coffee, usually a bad sign. Typically, if the day was going well, I’d escape notice for close to an hour before anyone wondered what I had to offer the meat-grinder other than the standard four or five briefs on car wrecks, drive-bys and house fires. By 2 p.m., the start of my evening shift, most of the next day’s paper was supposed to have shaped up already, with the four or five pieces that would go out front picked and at least half-way written. When a story or two fell apart, Politzki would rush my desk like a linebacker with ‘roid rage, still red in the face either from blushing after being sidelined during the editorial meeting with his bosses or from screaming at the people who reported to him shortly after, whose lack of reporting had gotten him reamed.

        "That smile on your face better be because you learned how to shit gold, Mojo, because if you don’t have three front page stories for us by 5 p.m. you and me are both out on our asses," Politzki said, slapping his copy of the budget print-out, the blue print for the next day’s news, down on my desk. There were more obscenities scratched on it in red than there were budget lines, half of which had been crossed out.

        I scanned the paper and swallowed the laughter that rose like acid reflux. All that remained as contenders for the front page were a piece by Melissa Harvey, our education reporter, on proposed changes to the school district’s lunch menu, a report by Adam Creaver on the mayor launching an initiative to crack down on people who park cars in their front-yards and a feature by Ben Calder, one of two almost identical scarecrow like general assignment reporters, about the city’s last true barber retiring, surrendering the city’s hairlines to hairdressers and stylists. None of the stories were without merit, I guessed, having been impressed by the work of the three reporters on the half-dozen occasions I’d actually read our newspaper. But they were the kinds of stories that led readers to wonder if their 50-cent donation to the dying industry should instead be applied toward the liquor fund of their favored local vagrants, who, according to a letter to the editor we published a week earlier, were just as reliable and twice as entertaining.

        "I’m sorry, Bill, I really am, but I just got in and I don’t have a thing. I’ll hump the scanner a while. Something will crop up," I said, awed by how little I cared whether my assurances would be realized. All I could think about was Kathy, rippling water, the percussion of flapping wings and the blissful absence of anything else.

        "I don’t care if you have to go out there and burn down city hall, we need something more than Dora the lunch lady to lead with tomorrow, you got me?"

        "Yeah, I got you."

        "I don’t know what you can do with this, but there was another burglary out in the West End this morning, pretty high-end place, like the others. We’ve got the police report up online already. Erica made a couple calls and they don’t have anything else for us, but maybe head down and talk some grandmas into telling you they’re gonna’ start packing, that shit’s always good. Talk to some home-security places, find out if they’re getting any more calls and see if we can get some art. Got it?"

        "Got it."

        "I’m counting on you, Mojo, you’re my man, you know that?"

        "I’ve still got the hickey to prove it if anyone doubts it, sir," I said, blushing once I realized there probably was one, for the first time in at least a decade, glowing on my neck. If Politzki noticed he didn’t show it, likely preferring to file it away and harass me at the bar after work when his audience would be larger and unconstrained in their ability to pile on by the company’s humorless chief editor and overly strict sexual harassment policies.

        Half an hour later I was knocking on the door of an enormous white house at the end of serpentine driveway lined with palm trees and plants that probably cost more to import than the people who tended to them. I half expected my unexpected visit to be answered with a shotgun blast and, if not for Kathy waiting for me at home, I’m not sure that I would have cared. Instead, the door cracked open revealing a reed-like woman, dressed in black with her ivory hair wound tight in a bun.

        "What do you want?"

        "My name is Morris Johnson, ma’am, I’m with the Bayeux Journal, I was hoping to visit with you about the break-in," I said, pulling the notepad out of my back pocket and flipping it open.

        "I’m certain the police have a file you may view," she said. "I don’t know that there’s anything I can tell you that I haven’t already told them. Not that it will do any good."

        Fresh tears formed in her eyes, blood in the water for a journalist desperate to feed. I wanted to leave, but torturing the poor woman for some details to beef up an otherwise bland story seemed slightly less agonizing than returning to Politzki empty-handed.

        "I’ve seen the report, ma’am," I lied. "I was hoping to get a little more detail about what was taken and to visit with you about what kind of impact these burglaries have had on you and the neighborhood."

        "I’m really not very much in the mood to talk about it," she said, but didn’t close the door. "But if you insist, come inside and have a seat, I’ll tell you whatever it is you must need to know."

        She escorted me through a sprawling living room packed with about a dozen people of varying ages, each of the men dressed in drab suits and the women in dark dresses.

        "This is Maurice Johnson," she announced to the assembly. "He’s with the newspaper. He would like to visit about the break-in."

        I waved and withstood the withering glances aimed my way as the woman, Debra Peeks, led me past the somber strangers and into a large study. As I settled into a heavy, leather chair I scanned the room and saw traces of black dust left behind by the police. Piles of leather-bound books had been scattered around the room, as if a twister had blown through.

        "My husband was a collector," Debra Peeks said, following my eyes. "He loved literature and what you see here, what’s left, is not mere ornamentation. He adored each and every one of these works. There are, or were, some extremely rare, hard to find books in here, but he purchased them to read, not as novelties to be trotted out to impress dinner guests. I had insisted several times that he at least store the more difficult to replace volumes somewhere more secure, but he wouldn’t hear of it. It’d be like locking up our children, he said."

        "Did they take a lot?"

        "Maybe a couple dozen," she said, sighing. "But they knew what they were doing. They didn’t touch any of the medieval illuminations or bibles, volumes too rare to easily resell, but they got his first edition Ulysses. I bought it for him as a gift after the cancer went into remission. We took a trip to Dublin and walked through the novel and the light in his eyes..."

        Her eyes welled up again and I fought down the urge to leave, aware I had to ask the question that had been inevitable since she’d answered the door.

        "Did your husband pass away recently?"

        "Yes," she whispered. "His funeral was just this morning. Those sons of bitches ransacked the place while we buried him."

        

I sickened myself by smiling as I worked my way back down the driveway to my distant car. If my suspicion was correct, it would be a good story, but not one the paper’s management would care for. If I was right, the police should already have formed the same idea and even if they wouldn’t acknowledge it a trip through the archives should be enough to make sure I was right.

        I didn’t get to write that story, though. Not then.

        Halfway back to the office sirens started screaming from the portable scanner I lugged around while in the field. The rapid-fire exchanges between EMS personnel and police officers revealed that there had been a major collision not far from where I was. If already back at the office, on an ordinary day, I could probably have shrugged it off, made a call to the department later for details and put together a brief—an article of no more than a few sentences that laid out the facts straight without any quotes or other filler. But we were as desperate for front-page art as we were stories and I knew that the second the little black box started screeching that one of our photographers would have already started racing for his truck, eager to capture for the ages an image of the metal pretzel now wrapped around a meat filling.

        I arrived at the scene of the accident three minutes later, just in time to see a paramedic zipping the body bag up. The victim’s car, a jet black Saab 900, was lying on its side in the grass median. A pink feather boa caught in the passenger’s side window was flapping in the breeze. It wasn’t hot out, I remember, the weather was cool, but every ounce of sweat poured out of my body as I stumbled toward the car.

        I don’t remember much after that, only, absurdly, that I pulled out my notepad and began scrawling down whatever it was that the paramedics told me and that Ryan Gribbit, the photographer on the scene, had to strong arm me into the passenger seat of his truck and drive me to his house after I tried to crawl back to my car, which I apparently planned to drive back to the office to file a report on the accident.

        I woke up in his bed the following day at about noon, my head still groggy enough from the sedative I’d been given that I wasn’t instantly aware that I was in a foreign place, only that my surroundings seemed strange.

        I found the newspaper folded neatly on the kitchen table. A picture of a warm, doughy lunch lady filled the center space above the fold and I almost allowed myself to breathe. I’d never known him as much of a drinker, but held on feebly to the hope that we had drained a bottle of vodka the night before and he had allowed me to crash on his bed for some reason, where I was subjected to an astonishingly realistic nightmare.

        I heard the toilet in the small bathroom off of the kitchen flush as I picked the paper up with trembling hands and knew that he had taken the day off to spend with me in the wake of the tragedy I soon saw reflected on the lower half of the paper, beneath the fold.