Every Dead Thing

He was messily divorced, the marriage over for maybe twelve years. His wife had reverted to her maiden name, Karen Stott, and lived in Miami with an interior decorator whom she had recently married. Woolrich’s only daughter, Lisa-now, thanks to her mother’s efforts, Lisa Stott-had joined some religious group in Mexico, he said. She was just eighteen. Her mother and her new husband didn’t seem to care about her, unlike Woolrich, who cared but couldn’t get his act together enough to do anything about it. The disintegration of his family pained him in a very particular way, I knew. He came from a broken family himself, a white-trash mother and a father who was well meaning but inconsequential, too inconsequential to hold on to his hellcat wife. Woolrich had always wanted to do better, I think. More than the rest, I believed, he shared my sense of loss when Susan and Jennifer were taken.

He had put on more weight since I last saw him, and the hair on his chest was visible through his sweat-soaked shirt. Rivulets rolled down from a dense thatch of rapidly graying hair and into the folds of flesh at his neck. For such a big man, the Louisiana summers would be a form of torture. Woolrich may have looked like a clown, may even have acted that way when it suited him, but no one in New Orleans who knew him ever underestimated him. Those who had in the past were already rotting in Angola penitentiary.

“I like the tie,” I said. It was bright red and decorated with lambs and angels.

“I call it my metaphysical tie,” Woolrich replied. “My George Herbert tie.”

We shook hands, Woolrich wiping beignet crumbs from his shirtfront as he stood. “Damn things get everywhere,” he said. “When I die, they’ll find beignet crumbs up the crack of my ass.”

“Thanks, I’ll hold that thought.”

An Asian waiter in a white paper cap bustled up and I ordered coffee. “Bring you beignets, suh?” he asked. Woolrich grinned. I told the waiter I’d skip the beignets.

“How you doin’?” asked Woolrich, taking a gulp of coffee hot enough to scarify the throat of a lesser man.

“I’m okay. How’s life?”

“Same as it ever was: gift wrapped, tied with a red bow, and handed to someone else.”

“You still with…what was her name? Judy? Judy the nurse?”

Woolrich’s face creased unhappily, as if he’d just encountered a cockroach in his beignet. “Judy the nut, you mean. We split up. She’s gone to work in La Jolla for a year, maybe more. I tell you, I decide to take her away for a romantic vacation a couple of months back, rent us a room in a two-hundred-dollar-a-night inn near Stowe, take in the country air if we left the window of the bedroom open, you know the deal. Anyway, we arrive at this place and it’s older than Moses’s dick, all dark wood and antique furniture and a bed you could lose a team of cheerleaders in. But Judy, she turns whiter than a polar bear’s ass and backs away from me. You know what she says?”

I waited for him to continue.

“She says that I murdered her in the very same room in a previous life. She’s backed up against the door, reaching for the handle and looking at me like she’s expecting me to turn into the Son of Sam. Takes me two hours to calm her down and even then she refuses to sleep with me. I end up sleeping on a couch in the corner, and let me tell you, those goddamned antique couches may look like a million bucks and cost more, but they’re about as comfortable to sleep on as a concrete slab.”

He finished off the last bite of beignet and dabbed at himself with a napkin.

“Then I get up in the middle of the night to take a leak and she’s sitting up in bed, wide awake, with the bedside lamp upside down in her hand, waiting to knock my head off if I come near her. Needless to say, this put an end to our five days of passion. We checked out the next morning, with me over a thousand dollars in the hole.

“But you know what the really funny thing is? Her regression therapist has told her to sue me for injuries in a past life. I’m about to become a test case for all those donut heads who watch a documentary on PBS and think they were once Cleopatra or William the Conqueror.”

His eyes misted over at the thought of his lost thousand and the games Fate plays on those who go to Vermont looking for uncomplicated sex.

“You heard from Lisa lately?”

His face clouded over and he waved a hand at me. “Still with the Jesus huggers. Last time she called me, it was to say that her leg was fine and to ask for more money. If Jesus saves, he must have had all his cash tied up with the savings and loan.” Lisa had broken her leg in a roller-skating accident the previous year, shortly before she found God. Woolrich was convinced that she was still concussed.

He stared at me for a time, his eyes narrowed. “You’re not okay, are you?”

“I’m alive and I’m here. Just tell me what you’ve got.”

He puffed his cheeks and then blew out slowly, marshaling his thoughts as he did so.