An Unforgiving Reality by Patrick Sean Lee (the top 100 crime novels of all time txt) 📖

that was a good thing in the end, I suppose,” he rambled. “Do you know how much goddam water comes out of one of those heads? Jesus, I nearly drowned before I made it out the back door. But I got the clothes.” He dropped his wild eyes to the saturated suit jacket, to his trousers, to his bare and withered feet. “I got them.”

    “Why? Why did you steal a suit of clothes? And what do you mean you started a fire? Where?”

    “Books! I needed the clothes to steal books…”

    Thus began Marvin’s explanation, perfectly rational to a madman, of how the dream had cropped up many months ago, and how it had worked its way from a dot in his head into that plain extending all the way to heaven. Driving him, if for no other reason than its intensity. A young woman, always the same. A path winding up to the top of a hill in a mythical landscape. At the top of the hill, a tree with a house nestled high up in its branches where he found himself over and over, night after night, sitting beside her. And always they were youthful. But never, never would she allow herself to be kissed, though he wished to with every fiber in his being. And then finally, a man would come, someone he had always loathed and feared, searching for the little girl.

    “What happened then?” Maribeth asked when he paused.

    “I don’t know. The dream always ends there, with him looking up at us...at her. It’s probably just as well it ends where it does. You know, like a dream of falling. What happens if you finish the dream? But how do I tell you the next part?” He gauged the look on her face to see if she suspected he was crazy. She merely stared at him with a look of bemused scrutiny.

    “I woke up yesterday. I hadn’t had a drop to drink in two days. Two whole days, I swear it. I saw it all. Everything laid out in front of me like a rug, with all the patterns and colors perfectly situated, like I’d woven it myself. I understood what this whole thing is all about—what’s been happening to me—although I don’t know who put it there, if anyone even did. Or exactly why. Those numbers! I got to thinking maybe I did bang my head in a drunken stupor, or wandered into a cloud of some kind of radioactive dust that made my…” Marvin stopped suddenly and grabbed her arms. He stared wild–eyed into her face.

    “I can read…Jesus Christ…I can read at the speed of lightning! And I understand it all. All of it! I never went to school for Christ’s sake! And…oh, you’re never going to believe this. I have to reverse my age! That’s why I need the books! I have to reverse my age and go find her!”

    Maribeth studied the face of the madman for a moment. His fingers clutching her arms seemed to shake, but his eyes betrayed something that called out to her in an inexplicable way. They were pleading. They were the eyes of a love-struck old fool. Yes, he was crazy as a loon; and so she decided.

    “You might just be crazy, sir,” she said. “But I’m going to help you.”

                                       ***

    The circulation in his feet had returned to normal, and so he grabbed the pink backpack filled with his latest life, and walked off toward upper downtown to search for a decent restaurant.

    He found one with no blinking neon signs or tawdry decorated windows, with a name he liked. French. La Mer. He pulled the heavy oak door outward and entered, tucking the end of his shirt collar back under the fabric of the lapel, beneath the daisy. The hostess greeted him with a veiled smile, and showed him to a table under the long front window, and when he had seated himself, she placed the menu on the linen tablecloth beside his plate. She was young, very tall—almost attractive--and she smiled when he laid the backpack onto the floor next to his chair. Her smile became apparent, now.

    “It’s my daughter’s,” he explained.

    “It’s very pretty. Can I get you a drink from the bar while you’re deciding what to order?” she asked.

    “No, thank you.”

    She turned and began to walk back to the front desk.

    “Wait.”

    The girl returned. Marvin flipped the thickly padded menu over to the back and glanced down the list of beverages.

    “Bring me a glass of wine. This one,” he said lifting the menu and pointing to an expensive Beaujolais Nouveau listed halfway down. She took note, then left with her smile unmasked.

    After all you’ve been through, you deserve a drink with dinner, Marvin. And you will have one.

 

                                         ***

    The morning came with fire. Marvin awoke to the cacophonous sound of earthmovers and dynamite. Giants shouting with barreled voices overhead. Demons dancing on his body, nailing spikes into his forehead; his temples exploding, a thirst unparalleled in the bitter annals of souls wandering the Sahara for days without water. He was freezing cold and boiling hot all at once. Someone had rolled him up, tied him in a knot, and then flung him into a pit.

 

A pit.

 

He opened his eyes with great difficulty, forcing the lids upward. The shadowy world surrounding him spun, stopped, spun again. He recognized the brick wall a few feet away, mixed with the dock joists bolted into the massive ledger. Floor planks running over them, and the faint flickering shadows of the giants and earthmovers filtering through the cracks.

 

He was home.

     He wondered, had it all been a dream? The girl, the mansion on the hill, the sudden brilliance? All that merely a wonderful interlude from this life he knew so intimately? He closed his eyes and covered his face with shaking hands, trying to force the hell of another hangover away—but he knew better. The only way to relieve the pain was to have another drink. He groped along the rim of the pit with a sweeping motion of his right hand and found the bottle. He couldn’t sit up, and so he hastily unscrewed the cap and let it fall away. He laid the bottle sideways on his chest, found his mouth with the knurled lip, and then tipped it up. Not whiskey. Wine. A good wine, too, he thought, because it was smooth. But then gasoline would have tasted smooth in that moment of parched agony. He drank until the last of it was gone. Yes, it had all been just a fabulous dream, but now he was awake, back to the real world, and before the hour was out he would feel better.

    Weighed down by the crushing noises above him and the pounding in his head, unable to think clearly, but unable to drag himself up over the precipice edge of the pit, Marvin closed his eyes. The half-liter of alcohol soon enough sedated him, and he fell back into a deep, troubled sleep.

                                     ***

    Maribeth cocked an ear suddenly and walked to the CD player Marvin had placed on a small table at the end of his desk. Two banjos, a guitar and fiddle were mixing it up at a furious pace. It seemed to her that someone on that recording was howling.

    “Really, Marvin, you need to refine your taste in music. I don’t want to make you feel bad, but this stuff is horrible! It’s meant for people who wear no socks or shoes and have teeth missing.” She picked up the CD cover, inspected it cursorily, and then returned it to its place atop the player.

    Marvin ran his tongue across his teeth. All present and accounted for, even the wisdom teeth.

    “You can turn it off if you like.”

    Maribeth did so.

    “You know, I was thinking about music just a moment ago, as a matter of fact. My dear mother, God rest her soul, loved the Broadway tunes. Once, when I was very young we took the streetcar from Globeville, downtown, so that she could buy some new LP record that had been released. I don’t remember what it was. The records then were a little different than the CD discs of today, kiddo. Ten inches in diameter, and thick!” He made a circle with his thumbs and middle fingers and placed it in front of his face.

    “It was a wonderful time; a gorgeous day late in June, I think. That would have been…let me see…in the late thirties.” He got up and walked to the closet, talking over his shoulder. “She bought me a stick of licorice, and then we walked around looking in the store windows on Sixteenth Street on our way to the music shop. The Great Depression was over and all those stores were filled with goods and shoppers. I remember stopping at the window of a toy store. The little yellow and red trucks were lined up inside the display window in a sand pit the owners had made. All of it arranged to look like a building site. I can still see it. Gosh, how I wanted one of those big dump trucks. Or a steam shovel. We had no grass in our backyard, just dirt and weeds. I could have built a whole city back there. Away from him.”

    Marvin glanced at the hangers bearing Richard’s cast off clothes and several shirts and pairs of pants Maribeth had bought for him. He selected a black, short sleeve shirt and a pair of black trousers, then closed the door and laid them on the bed.

    “Of course we couldn’t afford the three dollars for a toy truck. That was a fortune then. Mother and I left the city empty handed. She didn’t come right out and say it, but since she didn’t have the money to buy me a shiny new truck, she wasn’t going to buy herself a record.”

    He stopped and looked at Maribeth who stood in front of his desk on the far side of the bed, watching him, a sad expression lining her face. The lightweight turtleneck she wore framed her neck in such a way that her entire face seemed statuesque, classic. Her hair was parted in the middle, and the right side of it fell across her shoulder.

    “Have you ever not had enough of everything, Maribeth? Did your father ever beat you or your mother in a drunken rage? Have you ever heard Trish crying out, and heard the sounds of your father’s fists hitting her through the door of your bedroom? Do you know what terror is? That’s how I grew up. Unable to help her, wanting to create an imaginary city in hell. Wanting to see him die every night when he stumbled in the front door and fell into my city. See him expand in flames with terror and agony in his eyes.” Marvin dropped his gaze to the clothes, away from the memories that haunted him.

    “I’m so sorry, Marvin. No one…no child...should ever, ever have to live through that.” She said nothing else. Neither was looking at the other; Marvin at the clothing on his bed, Maribeth at her hands and crimson fingernails. The silence quickly became uncomfortable. Marvin heaved a sigh, and then began unbuttoning his shirt, as though he was late for a very important engagement.

    “Those books I need! Guess I’d better get into my cat burglar outfit. Turn around,” he said almost cheerily.

    Outside, at the corner of the hall and the poolroom, Robert, the head servant, looked furtively into the bedroom through the half opened door. Maribeth had disappeared somewhere inside. Though he could not hear the conversation, he saw Marvin smile after a few moments, and then begin to take off his shirt and pants. Robert’s eyes narrowed, and