Love and Death in the Sunshine State Read online

  Time was dim, he regularly said. He did not like to think back on the past, and because of this, he had difficulty remembering it. He’d be forty before too long. Since that first incarceration, he had not spent any considerable period outside of prison. He did not mention that even those brief intervals of liberty had been crowded with minor altercations and arrests, fines, warrants, and restitution. Nor did he describe the detailed record of charges and arrests I was to discover later. They spanned two decades and a thousand miles: trespass, disorderly conduct, driving without a license, driving while intoxicated (level 5), speeding, possession of stolen property, possession of marijuana, possession of paraphernalia, driving while license revoked, driving while impaired, driving while intoxicated (level 2), open container, breaking and entering, larceny, assault, simple assault, battery of a law enforcement officer, cultivation of marijuana, arson, failure to wear a seat belt, fishing without a license.

  “In here, man, I’m fine,” he said. “No problems. A model prisoner. Out there?” He shook his head.

  We didn’t come around to the topic of Sabine until the afternoon. She deserved to be found, I told him, and he looked at me for a long time.

  “You say her name like she did,” he said. “Suh-BEE-nuh.” He licked his fingers. “The detectives say suh-BEEN.” He reached for another pastry. “We don’t get real food in here. You play cards?”

  The onset of their affair was rapid and poorly concealed, and in short order, they were discovered by Sabine’s husband in one of the motel’s suites. At the time, according to Cumber, that marriage was just a piece of paper filed at the courthouse, and her husband was angry less about the affair than the fact that they’d chosen to pursue it at the motel. Tom said if they wanted to continue seeing each other, they do it elsewhere, and so by the time Bill was paroled on the first of September, Sabine had rented an apartment for them out at the northern end of Anna Maria. She furnished and painted it, and when he got out she threw him a welcome home party. The relationship wasn’t perfect, he said, but whose was. Tom tried to come between them, Bill said. That was the hardest part. Sometimes they argued about it, and then she would leave the apartment and spend the night at the home she still shared with Tom. Without a driver’s license or a car, Bill felt trapped on the island at times, totally dependent on her. But those disagreements were the exception, not the rule. He and Sabine loved each other. They took bike rides, went out for dinner, walked on the beach at dusk. He gave up smoking for her. They had planned to go to Germany together.

  “What about that night?” I said. “What did you do that last night?”

  “Just regular boring stuff,” he said. “We watched TV.”

  At one point, he’d gone outside to smoke a cigarette. He’d quit for her birthday, but he didn’t think she’d know if he snuck one. The quarrel that followed was unhappy but typical. She grabbed her keys and drove away. That was it. As he’d told investigators again and again, he tried to contact her but he hadn’t seen her since. He thought she might be still alive. She’d always talked about running away somewhere, and he hoped she had. He just wished she’d let someone know.

  By this time many of the other visitors had left. The guards were preparing to close the room.

  “What about the blood?” I said. “Aren’t you worried about her?”

  “Heck yeah, I’m worried about her, man.” He picked up the deck of cards and shuffled it. “I loved her, man. I still love her.”

  We stood and shook hands.

  “Hey,” he said. “Real quick, and I don’t mean any disrespect. But there’s nothing to do here. I mean it gets boring. Do you think if I sent you some titles of books you’d be able to help me out?”

  5: Impulses Diverted

  My departure from Florida after this interview bore some resemblance to a man disappearing into a crevasse. One moment, I was sitting in the parking lot of the prison listening to my messages; the next second, one could just make out the whinny of a loose steering belt in the distance as the station wagon banked a curve and headed north. The reason for this hurry was quite simple. There had been three messages on my phone when I left the prison: the first, from Forrest, saying that if I was free he’d be happy to show me sandcastle pictures whenever was convenient—he was available all week; the second, from my mother, wondering if they’d found that motel woman yet—she hoped I was having fun; the last, from Erin, saying that she couldn’t stop thinking about me—she wanted to meet.

  I had to teach my first class of the semester in Iowa in about thirty-six hours. I spread the atlas out on the passenger-side seat. It was possible. If we met halfway, we could share four or five hours before I needed to turn west. I called her back, and as our rendezvous point, we selected a motel, the very name of which—the Lynnette—seemed to promise some indefinable intrigue. I was on the highway even before we’d said goodbye.

  I feel I should note here that when I considered the coming hours at the Lynnette, all thoughts of William Cumber and Sabine Musil-Buehler were swept from my mind by my lewd and far more immediate hopes for the near future. I was a young man, it will be remembered. I lived alone and drove a station wagon. As I sped north, I did not think of the prison I’d left behind but of the motel that lay ahead. I imagined swaying pines in the parking lot, a shag rug in the office. The room would contain a television in its own faux-oak cupboard and a mustard-colored couch onto which we would tumble in a confusion of lips and limbs. It is important to also note, though, that tied up in those imaginings was some embryonic vision of what it would be like to be around Erin. I imagined, for instance, that I would read aloud to her from the works of Sir Thomas Browne, that we would walk along a leafy country road, that she would shower while I lay in bed, listening to the water run. The motel would have an attached miniature golf course, where, between wholesome romps, we would putt a little. With the pines of Georgia blurring outside my window, I was already developing some idea, however unrealistic, of what life would be like in her company.

  Shortly after noon, on a rural valley highway deep in Appalachia, I slipped through the opposing traffic and wheeled the Taurus into the empty gravel parking lot of the Lynnette. I had driven the night through without stopping, and I was by that moment so involved in my own thoughts that the full visual impact of the motel did not at first strike me. It was not until I reached the double plexiglass window of the office, yellowed by age and crazed with minuscule lines, its corners begrimed, not until having plaintively rung the brass bell for some minutes, that I turned around and began to absorb the surroundings. The motel formed a narrow horseshoe, the top of the U facing the road and a fallow field, the U’s bottom concealing—I could just hear its gurgle—a brook, where one could imagine a few abandoned grocery carts upended on the rocks or the kerchiefed remains of a missing Boy Scout. The building itself, though to call it a building implies a uniformity of form and structure so markedly absent, reminded me of those false-front Western sets, the worn mishmash of facades ready at any moment to collapse into their original timbers. I heard a man groan, and in a dim doorway at the back of the office, a large figure appeared. In his general features, I recognized him instantly as a fixture from the sub shops of my youth: faded blue jeans, a sleeveless undershirt, a gelatinous belly straining a leather belt, which creaked as he approached.

  “Do you have a room available?”

  He sucked on a thick finger and squinted at a wall of beaverboard, on which every room key hung.

  “What’s available?” he shouted, and again in that dim rectangle at the back of the office, a shape appeared, a pale woman, pushing before her a vast beach-ball pregnancy; she could only be the eponymous Lynnette. She leaned against the jamb, eyeing me from behind a tuberous nose, and my febrile brain immediately imagined the man, fresh from some lawn-mower repair, pawing at her in the vacant rooms of the motel.

  “Give him twelve,” she said, and receded quickly into the dark, where, a moment later, a baby cried.

  He
hunted around in a pile of magazines, finally locating his guest ledger, and he began to take down my information, writing with concentration. As I watched the pen move deliberately across the page, my thoughts turned to the passing minutes, the sun overhead, and the effect it might be having on the champagne, the box of chocolates, and the bulk carton of condoms sitting on my passenger seat.

  “Method of payment?” he said, and he looked up as a dark-blue sedan whipped into the lot. The shock to my system must have registered clearly on my face. He laid on me a grin. “With you?”

  She wore a jean skirt, and a tight shirt, striped blue and white. She was jacketless and jaunty as she stepped out of the car into the January air. I nodded, and he flipped back a page in his ledger. From the back room, the hoarse voice of the woman shouted, “Give him number eight!”

  Erin and I soon stood side by side in the doorway of our room as upon a great precipice. The fragrance of some common deodorant drifted off her, and the boisterous smell of peppermint gum. In other circumstances, that scent would have palled, but it delighted me now with its portents of unabashed kissing. Number eight had no mustard-colored sofa, no microwave, not even a bulky black television on which only Full House played. The walls were paneled in pine. On the ceiling, a fan swung slowly, circulating a clear ammoniac air. On one side of the room hung a painting of irises, and beneath it was a queen bed, strikingly white, its sheets tucked and folded crisply.

  “Champagne?” I said, crossing the floor and standing against the far wall.

  “Please.” She lay back on the bed. “Pretty comfy.”

  The cork ricocheted around the room and lost itself in some dark corner.

  “To freedom,” I said, sitting beside her again and holding out two plastic cups.

  “To today.”

  I threw back my glass and refilled it. “So how was your drive?”

  She sat up then, pulled the cup from my fingers with a few soothing sounds, and pulled me down to the mattress with her in such a way that my mouth landed atop hers, and in near silence, some pleasant moments passed.

  The champagne, the chocolates, and the condoms all evidenced a very distinct, if clichéd, sense of purpose, and while I wasn’t entirely certain of Erin’s plans, I thought I at least knew my own mind. And yet after that kiss, as we lay on the bed at the Lynnette, outlined by a broad panel of afternoon light, when she pulled away and held herself at arm’s length, regarding my eyes for a sign of the thoughts behind them, my constitution underwent some drastic and sheepish alteration. Prior to this moment, I had flirted, dined, dated, and even slept with women, and I had some sense of the trajectory of things. So I was all the more disturbed then by this lack not of desire but of will. I could not bring myself to reach out, to make the next gesture that would indicate my own interest in the project at hand. It was as if I’d forgotten how the machinery worked.

  I cast about desperately, as one does under extremities of duress, for some external cause. My mind sprang from one thought to the next without logic or pattern. I watched the fan spinning above us and thought perhaps there was a chill in the room dampening my desires, or, catching sight of a small vent positioned high on one of the walls, I imagined the owners of the motel, secreted away in their voyeurs’ loft, siphoning the ardor from our own tepid endeavors to fuel their own wild and shameless acts. I felt suddenly exhausted, and I thought that certainly if I hadn’t driven all night, if I hadn’t spent the past hours counting down the miles and watching the eyes of does swim up like flecks of neon in the headlights, if I hadn’t spent the past days looking for a woman who was at that very moment probably moldering in a shallow unmarked grave, then perhaps I would have been able to do as I’d wanted, to take her in my arms and declare her mine. It occurred to me that if I could simply focus, simply keep my mind on one thing—the tip of her nose, for instance, or a certain knot in the pine paneling — then perhaps I would be able, by latching on to this physical detail, to regain control of my thoughts. But no sooner had I fixed my eyes on the knot of wood than I thought it looked like the profile of Sabine Musil-Buehler, and I recalled the interview of the day before, the warmth of the pastries in their plastic packaging, the slow action of Bill Cumber’s jaw as he chewed, and the whitening of his knuckles around the edge of the table as he spoke about that night: I loved her, man. I still love her.

  Perhaps thirty seconds had passed. Erin still lay at arm’s length, the side of her head against the pillow. A strand of hair had fallen down across her cheek, and taking it between my two fingers, I pushed it back from her face and tucked it behind one ear, and she, as she often had when we were younger, arched first one eyebrow and then the other. Then, seeing that she couldn’t elicit even a smile from me, she moved her forehead so that her brows waggled together in a single fluid wave. And because I had no words to explain what was actually occurring in my mind, I smiled and introduced some other topic of conversation.

  It hardly matters what I said, since my only reason for speaking was to make the hours pass as quickly as possible. I recall some observations about the weather, an explanation of the near loss of the Floridian strawberry crop, the recitation of a sermon I’d chanced across on the radio about the sins of Onan. I spoke at some length about Sabine Musil-Buehler, about the fire at the motel, and about the strange man I’d just met, who I thought might have committed murder, and I watched as she listened, first with interest, then bemusement, then confusion, and finally, propping her head up on one hand, with resignation.

  I’d first met Erin in seventh grade, the year that Katie Briggs got pregnant and Katie Karlson broke both legs jumping from a tree house, and Katie Tedesco, whom all the boys dreamed to fondle, kissed Travis Podolski for an hour and a half in the back of a rented van on the way home from a birthday party at the skating rink. This was also the year, due to some glitch in the primordial computer system then creating middle schoolers’ schedules, that I was unable to eat lunch at the normal hour with my peers; and so I faced the prospect of a year of dining alone, my only company being the lunchroom monitor, a student teacher in algebra.

  I had eaten perhaps three of these solemn repasts when Erin appeared. She had not yet attained the height that would eventually disqualify her from serious gymnastics competition, and so to accommodate her rigorous schedule of practices, she too had been exiled to my lonely lunch island. Of that first day, I remember only that I had a pork sandwich and grapes, and that Erin, to my amazement, after extracting, arranging, and eating one bagged lunch from her backpack, pulled out a second one and repeated the process exactly, a strange Nietzschean reiteration that she was to continue every single day and that she explained to me, without the slightest embarrassment, was a gymnast’s caloric necessity.

  Looking now at a photograph of the two of us from that time, it is clear to me that puberty, not wanting to launch children too soon into their careers of love, provides its own prophylactic, and I have difficulty believing that either of us, even in the most deranged states of mind, could have been attracted to the other. My laissez-faire approach to personal hygiene had resulted in a marked slouch, grimy fingernails, and a large blond Afro in the mold of Carlos Valderrama. Erin possessed the broad shoulders and calloused hands of an uneven bars specialist, and the athlete’s preoccupation with sweatpants and sweatshirts, and beneath that coarse gray fabric, her body was but a cruel rumor. In addition to this, her physical development had proceeded unevenly, an affliction of gymnasts and nongymnasts alike, and her petite frame had been far outpaced by her generous and regal nose.

  But such prolonged contact with a member of the opposite sex during this testosteronally precarious interval was bound to have an effect, and from time to time, I imagined a day before school when one of our disgruntled classmates would fire a bullet into a crowd of his peers, a bullet that I would intercept just before it struck Erin’s heart, whereupon swooning in her arms, I would make some sort of confession and we would kiss. We exchanged notes almost daily, notes in whic
h I tried to make known to her the feelings I myself hardly realized I possessed. They nearly always featured a series of multiple-choice questions, this form being the most familiar to middle schoolers. By such obtuse and limited means, I wooed:

  If it was midnight, and raining, and the only warmth you could find in all the land was a hot tub full of lukewarm green Jell-O, who would you be most horrified to discover already in said tub:

  A. Mrs. Dieffenderf

  B. Horace Wells

  C. Mr. Angley

  D. Me

  My confused attempts at courting that year were made even more hesitant by the recent death of my grandmother. The victim of some unnamed illness, she had spent my childhood in a state of near total catatonia, seated statue-like in the corner of the kitchen, only her eyes moving to follow me as I crossed the room. It was not until her death that spring that it occurred to me there may have been no physical illness, or rather I overheard two relatives surmising as much, speaking in low tones behind the arborvitae at the funeral parlor about the cruelty to which my grandfather had subjected her—never meanness outright but a gradual and cumulative disdain, under the force of which she had slowly worn away until now she was finally gone. At the time, I did not feel any anger toward my grandfather about how her life had ended. Nor was I disturbed by his speedy reentry into the world of dating. I only resented that I was obliged each Friday to put on a collared shirt and to go out for dinner with my parents, my grandfather, and a new date.

  My grandfather’s approach to courting bore no small resemblance to the blitzkrieg that we were then learning about in school. As Rommel sped across the sands of Africa, swift, ruthless, unrelenting, Judge Wood sought to overwhelm and exhaust the stock of local widows by the application of pure speed. No woman, provided she was single, was spared in this assault. An entire bridge club was invited to dinner, one by one, as was my maternal grandmother. One week, with a horror surpassed only by her own, I found Mrs. Dieffenderf seated at the table, still dressed in the purple sneakers and purple sweater that were for her a sort of uniform, but doused now in a gardenia perfume.