Unseaming Read Free Page A

intent you were on the who and where of Mr. Lenahan, perhaps you only lent half an ear’s credence to the other things he said.
You found Billy’s apartment, inside a house sided with flaking paint and rotting wood in a neighborhood once proud and rich, now long abandoned to poverty, slouching among the drug lairs with cars coming and going at all hours, a rundown convenience store at the corner with crack pipes for sale by the register.
Half of the front porch has collapsed, you don’t know how whoever lives in the front apartments can get to their doors, but it’s not your problem because Willett lives in the basement apartment accessed from the back. A sullen pit bull watches you from a chain-link kennel as you walk past; the dog’s black back is splotched with mange or scars. It has no shelter from the sun.
You walk down the short concrete steps to the door. The house has sunk into the earth over many years; the bottom step and the threshold no longer meet. You bang the door, hear a woman’s voice croak inside.
A moment later she pulls the door open and squints at you, a short stick figure with tattoos flanking her withered cleavage, crowned with a shriveled apple face, dirty mop-grey hair cropped close to her head. Above her a chain stretches to its taut limit, restricting entrance.
You try to sound pleasant. I’d like to talk to Billy.
Get oughtta here, she croaks. You go.
The Glock presses cold against your skin, hidden in the waistband of your jeans beneath your baggy T-shirt. For a moment you think of simply forcing your way in. Surely, given the house’s decay, the chain would pull out of the wall with just a burst of pressure. You see yourself stepping over the old woman as she flounders on the floor.
I really need to see him, you say.
Let us alone, she says, and shuts the door. You turn to go. You look at the other houses, great rambling derelicts like this one, some sporting mock towers and turrets that were no doubt gloriously gaudy in their heyday. You wonder whether those windows will be lit after dark, if anyone might be watching. There’s a half-formed plan in your head, what you might do if you come back then.
But behind you, the jingling sound of the chain undone. A click, a creak, the old woman’s croak: He want to talk to you.
Once you’re inside, she watches you with eyes narrowed, wrinkles radiating out from the disapproving line of her mouth. The room you’ve stepped into is cleaner than you expected, a cramped dun sofa facing a vast widescreen TV with the sound off and the picture hopelessly blurred. She points down the hall, where a door stands ajar–this door incongruously painted with a crude scene of two kids playing on a swing set beneath a smiley-face sun.
As you head for the bedroom, she croaks behind you, Don’t you hurt my son.
You want to say, No promises, but you don’t.
The room is decorated in the same childish way as the door, but you don’t take it all in. You’re looking at Willett, what’s left of him, half-tucked beneath sheets in a bed that would have been too small if he still had legs. His arms, though, are still stout through the biceps, taut and wiry. His shoulders bunch and ripple as he hears you come in, props himself up. The sheet slides down and for a queasy moment you think it will slide off, bare him completely, and you don’t know what you’ll see then, what horrid mass of scar tissue he must truncate in.
But you’re spared, the sheet pauses at his navel, exposing tattoos that crawl up his abdomen and chest, oriental dragons coiled around naked bimbos. You think of Denise, staring at that vulgar art as she straddled Willett’s hips and sank down, and it makes you sick.
Willett’s thin, angular face, with the stubble-shrouded cleft in his chin, remains handsome, or would have without the fleshy puckers where his eyes once were. But it’s as if those scars can see, because he turns to you.
You’re finally here, he says. His voice sounds choked with