The Subtle Art of Brutality

“No. She wouldn’t give her money without telling me everything. She’s as worried as I am.”

“Have you spoken to her?”

“Yes. She’s in the Navy, you know. An officer. Her boat is in a port in Australia right now.”

“You can reach her?”

“Yes.”

“Give me the number.”

49

Belinda Boothe: voice mail. Jeremiah Cross: car keys. Ben Boothe: I’m at his front door.

50

“I’m looking for Delilah. She around?”

Standing at the door, half a cigarette hanging from his mouth. Middle-aged, weary from a lifetime of hard living.

Ben Boothe: wiry guy. It’s not so much that he is muscular but rather he has absolutely no body fat. The minimum required muscle it takes to operate the human body is accentuated on him because there is nothing between it and the sandpapered skin stretched taut over it. That illusion makes him appear ripped. Every vein running

across him is thick and revealed.

His black hair is heavily salted with an unflattering tone of dirty white. Even at his age his stubble is patchy and thin, but long enough to look scummy. The whites of his eyes are yellow. Small scars from things that look like knife tips are stippled across his body. His nails belong on a rodent. I can see where, back in his early twenties, he might have been handsome. But those years have been pillaged by a lifetime of unbridled self-destruction.

Ben Boothe: human weasel.

He stares right back at me. You can always tell a person who has been hardened by prison. There are lots of things that will harden anyone but prison has its own feel. It chisels with its own style. It makes all the features sharper, detached. Cold the way a serpent is. Somewhere in there are fangs.

I used to ask myself if the fangs were there before the individual went to prison. If they were the reason the individual went to stir, or if they appeared after. On the inside. Chicken or egg.

I never found a suitable answer. Not one. Now I don’t care. Haven’t for a long time.

“No,” Ben Boothe says back to me. “She ain’t anywheres to be found.”

“May I come inside for a moment?”

“No.”

“Well, then...” I look around for a moment. It’s fucking freezing outside here. But oh well. We do it here then. “When was the last time you’d seen her?” I light a smoke.

“Go ask that twat cop who came sniffin’ around here.” Rudd’s been by.

“I’m asking different questions than she did,” I say. “The answers she has won’t help me.”

“All pork speak the same language. Ask the same shit. It’s all you know.”

“These are mistakes, friend,” I say. Heat is rising. Not so cold anymore.

“Who the fuck are you, pretty boy?” he asks, standing taller.

“Pretty boy? Do I look like the cover of a magazine to you? Or is that the pen coming out?”

“You look pretty,” he says.

I exhale and do my best impersonation of a man who would let a comment like that pass by. I say again: “When was the last time you have seen your youngest daughter?”