PART I
It’s hard to tell where I’m going, surrounded by all of the trees. They seem to stretch on forever and there’s blood in my eyes. I hear Jordy scream my name. But when I stop and turn he shouts, “Keep running, Meg.” And then he howls in pain as he’s drawn into the sky.
Jordy had been working at our video store for over two years before he started using the job as a way to deal drugs. It was a pretty simple transaction. If you came in and asked him for “a double feature and a pizza extra cheese” he’d put a quarter of weed into a hollowed-out VHS tape and give it to you. You’d pay him by taping a folded-up twenty dollar bill to your video store membership card, which he’d peel off and pocket without any of us seeing him do it. The deal only worked when Jordy was manning the front desk. Which was often enough. Because really, Video Dreams was a family-run operation.
It was just my mom and dad working the store to begin with. And then when I got to high school, I’d work nights and weekends. Mom got a job as a file clerk with the town, where her library sciences degree was put to better use. We expanded into the dry cleaners next door and, overnight, became the biggest video store in Trenton. It was 1987 and business was booming. That’s when Dad hired Jordy.
He was a kid from the neighborhood. My mom said that his aunt Mina was my grandmother’s second cousin, and his dad played basketball with my dad, Stan, when they were in junior college together. Jordy was always at the store. Ever since he was old enough to ride his bike into town on his own, he’d come and hang out and browse the VHS boxes for hours. He’d read all of the descriptions on the back. My dad was a big movie nerd too, so they’d get to talking for hours. Never about who made what movies or actors or anything like that. Just about the stories. And occasionally the special effects, if there was a particularly gruesome creature or neat space sequence. He was mostly into horror and sci-fi stuff. Same as Dad. They got along well.
Which is why it broke my father’s heart to fire him. Jordy never told me, but I think he was dealing out of Video Dreams for six months before we caught on. It was September of ‘89 when Dad confronted him. I remember because school was just starting back up again. Back in March of that year, some skater kids from my class left the store laughing and proclaiming, “Can’t wait to eat this cheese pizza!” Which stuck with me, because they didn’t seem to have any pizza with them and we only sold candy. Jordy had been dealing out of the store for at least six months, maybe more.
Dad first picked up on it one night when an older gentleman, a bookish looking accountant-type, approached the counter. It was only my father manning the store that night. It took the man a few tries before he got the line out, saying, “I’d like a double feature with a pizza, extra cheese.” Before Dad responded, the man laid his membership card down on the counter with the twenty taped to it.
“We don’t sell pizza here,” Dad told him. To which the man replied, “I was told that your pizza is the very best.” After a few moments of silence, the man realized he had gotten something wrong. He collected his membership card and quickly exited the store.
The following Thursday night (Thursdays were always our busiest nights), Dad put Jordy at the checkout, while he reorganized the Classics section. A woman was asking my father if he recommended Wait Until Dark when he spotted a shaggy, college-aged couple approach the counter and ask for a double feature and a cheese pizza. Jordy returned from the back a moment later but by then Dad was there to intercept the hollowed-out copy of Critters with the ganja in it. The couple shuffled off. Jordy hung his head. That was his last night working for us.
I didn’t see much of Jordy after that, not for fifteen years, when he showed up at my dad’s funeral. His arms were covered in tattoos and I could tell he’d been using more than cheese pizza. He was sobbing. I hugged him and told him that my father loved him like a son and never held any ill will for him. Which was a lie. Dad cursed his name more times than I can recount. When Video Dreams started to struggle in the late ‘90s, after a Blockbuster went in next to the college, Dad would say that he felt like the store’s good luck started to run out the moment Jordy turned our store into a “drug haven.” This was an overstatement. But people had found out about the drug history connected to Video Dreams, and a funny cloud hung over the store after Jordy left. That was true.
I worked at the store all the way through college and graduate school. Dad needed all the help he could get. Even when I began my career as a social worker, I’d still pitch in a shift here and there. Business went away fast, and debt crept in. Dad kept his entire library of VHS tapes and DVD discs after we shut Video Dreams down. It was always his intention to reopen it when “movie fans realized that there’s a lot of good stuff they can’t find any more.” Sadly, that day didn’t come. Dad was hit by a bus as he was leaving his security job at the college. Witnesses said he was walking around with a shuffle in his step and stumbled off a curb at precisely the wrong moment. I knew he was drunk. He started drinking heavily when the store went away. He didn’t want to hear anything about it from Mom or me. He’d tune us out and just drink and watch old movies.
A few days after we buried my father, I saw Jordy again. He showed up at the social services office in Bordentown where I was working. He asked me to have lunch with him and we walked to the diner down the block.
“You were always like a sister to me, Meg. I feel like those early years at the video store with your mom and dad were the closest to a real family life that I ever got.”
I nodded but didn’t comment. Being a good social worker is about listening and not stepping in to offer a response until the emotional moment is right. I could tell Jordy needed to get something off his chest. And he was fidgety. I assumed he was still using, and dealing with withdrawal.
“I just wish I hadn’t fucked it up. It was the worst decision of my life. I wonder where I’d be now if I hadn’t been such an idiot.”
“My folks always loved having you around. You and Dad loved all the same movies.”
“Yeah, we liked the weird stuff. Movies where the heroes were just as messed up as the villains.”
Jordy’s father used to beat him with a belt. Neck down, so there were no noticeable marks. I had no idea that this was going on while Jordy was working for us. When I heard about it years later, after Jordy’s dad had fallen to his death at a construction job, I confronted my father about the beatings and asked him if he knew. He swore he’d had no idea. It was Jordy’s grandma who told everyone her son was a child beater. By then, Jordy was mixed up with some gangsters in Philly and not around town much.
“I would have never fired him if I knew his dad was hurting him like that,” my father said when we talked about it. And then he cried.
“Dad didn’t understand what you were going through. None of us did. He would have made different choices if he had,” I told Jordy.
He shifted in his seat at the diner and gave a weak smile. “Well,” he said, “I guess we don’t always know what kind of movie we’re watching from what happens in the beginning.”
He wanted to know if I still had all the old video tapes. I did. Dad had rented a storage unit in New Hanover, more out in the country, and Mom and I planned to keep the tapes there until we figured out what to do with them. Jordy asked if we could go have a look. “I just want to be surrounded by them again. Read some of the boxes.”
It made sense to me. He wanted to relive his last moment of innocence. Before things broke for him. I got this a lot in my line of work. People yearning to reconnect with a simple beauty that’s been lost, even if it’s just a taste. The distraught and mentally ill are like junkies for nostalgia, for the time before it went bad.
We met at the storage facility the following weekend. I think Jordy was trying to avoid being high around me so he was very jittery. He was shaking more than he had been at the diner. He had a grouchy disposition. When I said, “good morning,” he scoffed at me and said, “Easy to say when you’ve got all the answers.” I stared at him for a moment and he apologized. But I got the sense that he was only taking it back because he didn’t want me to leave without letting him in to see the tapes.
I’d never been in the storage unit. Dad had done a remarkable job of stacking the tapes in sections, by genre. The most recent tapes sat on top of the piles and descended by year. So it was incredibly easy to browse. Jordy wasted no time, moving for the horror pile and looking up and down the stacks while I perused our small documentary collection. It only took him two minutes to find what he was looking for. I looked up and saw Jordy standing over me, holding a weathered copy of Def-Con 4. The cover featured a skeleton in an astronaut suit, half-buried on a sandy planet with a space station looming overhead. I’d never seen it.
“Do you mind if I keep this one? It’s an old favorite, and I can’t find it anywhere.” There was an intensity to his request and his right hand was clenched in a white-knuckle fist at his side.
“It would mean so much to me,” he said.
I nodded. “Sure, Jordy. Of course.”
He turned quickly and walked out of the storage unit. That was all he was really looking for. I locked up. When I got back to the parking lot Jordy was in his car, disassembling the tape. I pretended to fish for my keys in my purse while I covertly watched him open it up and pull out a sandwich bag of white powder.
I climbed into my car and started it up. Jordy knocked on my window. “Thanks for bringing me by,” he said. “That meant a lot to me. We’ll see how the movie plays. I have a feeling it’ll hold up just fine.”
“You take care,” I said and I drove away.
That was eighteen years ago. After that, he just sort of disappeared. My guess was that he probably got himself into trouble, either by using or mixing up with the wrong people. Maybe he was dead. Three years after our storage unit experience, he was a no-show at his grandmother’s funeral and everyone in his family was quiet when his name came up except for an uncle who I overheard say, “That boy is swimming with the fish.” Which meant that Jordy had been murdered by the mafia or gangsters. Didn’t surprise me. I had seen more than a few young men like Jordy meet a similar fate.
I thought about him from time to time. Especially when Mom and I cleared out all of the VHS tapes. We donated them to the college, after we heard they were opening a new screening center that was VHS-friendly.
It was a Tuesday in early June the next time I saw him. I had just gotten back from visiting with a family who had been dealing with an abusive stepdad situation, when Jordy approached me as I was unlocking my office door.
“Meg Manchette. The sign on the door makes you look more like a private investigator than a social worker.”
In some ways, being a social worker wasn’t so different from being a private investigator. And truth be told, I’d taken a bunch of jobs that blurred the line between social service and investigative work since I opened my own practice.
“How’s that for a rewind. How you doing, Jordy? Didn’t think I’d see you again.”
“You thought I was dead,” he said and I didn’t respond. “Can we talk inside?”
I let him into the office. We sat in the lobby and I took the armchair in the corner, the one with a Smith & Wesson taped underneath it. I deal with a lot of ugly situations and bad people in my work. This dude stole from me last time. And he was a longtime addict. I couldn’t trust him. Not anymore.
That said, Jordy was looking better. Gaunt and aged, but with good color in his face. He had a brown leather jacket on and dark slacks with black tennis shoes. Which meant he was either a caterer or a chauffeur. “You’re taking care of yourself,” I told him.
“Trying. I bottomed out hard, not long after we saw each other last. Spent five years in a Mexican prison.” I let out a whistle. Jordy smiled. “If a Mexican prison doesn’t teach you not to take your shit for granted, then nothing will. Worked on some oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico for a few years. Found God and then lost him again. Got married and divorced, which was tied to the God stuff. Ended up back in Philly about six years ago. Working as a driver for some businessmen.”
I knew the kinds of businessmen that hired guys like Jordy as their drivers. They were the types of men who expected bullets from their associates and invested in human shields.
“Quite the run,” I said. “I’m happy to find that you’re alive.”
“I almost died ten times down in Mexico. Sometimes, I think I did die down there.” He looked at his hands. I got up and made us two cups of coffee from my machine. When I came back to the lobby, Jordy was standing.
“I don’t want to waste your time. I’ve done a lot of dumb things to you and your family. I’m sorry for that.”
It was okay, I told him. Shit happens.
“I don’t know who I can trust any more,” he went on. “Most of my family is dead and the ones who are still alive, I think they’re watching them. Waiting for me to show up. You were always real nice to me. Like family.”
“What kind of trouble are you in?” I asked.
“The worst kind. They’re going to kill me. The men I work for. To cover up for what they’ve done. Some crooked cops are in the mix. If I went to the cops, I’m not sure I’d find the right one.”
I knew plenty of good cops. Most of them were good. But the bad ones had their spies. If the cops were after him, it could be because he was mixed up with corrupt cops or it could be because he was a lowlife criminal that deserved apprehending.
I asked him again. “What kind of trouble are you in?”
“They call me Sleepy Head. You heard of me?”
“Have I heard of Sleepy Head?”
“Yeah. I run all up and down the state, from Philly through Trenton and Newark, up to the Big Apple.”
“I’ve never heard of Sleepy Head,” I said.
“It started out, I was just driving for this rich dude. He had someone he was having issues with, an old accountant of his. So he had me drive this guy out to the Pine Barrens at dusk. Told me to wear a gas mask and just drop the accountant off and leave him in the middle of the forest there. The guy pleaded with me, said he’d pay me to let him walk. When I left him outside in the Barrens, he got real slow, sleepy, like he was in a daze. Just kind of started wandering around. I drove away. And the accountant was never heard of again. I told a couple of other guys about that and it turns out they had some people who they wanted to have disappear. So I did it again, and again. Just dropped people off at dusk in the Pine Barrens while I was wearing a breathing mask. As soon as they’d get out of the car, they’d start wandering around like they were in a dream. I’d drive off and leave them there. And that’s the last that anyone would ever see of them.”
“That’s kind of like murder, Jordy.”
“Kind of. But it isn’t. I was just leaving people in the woods. And most of the time, I was working for cops who wanted to have criminals disappear. Bad guys who got off on charges. Then I got in so deep that I couldn’t stop. They wouldn’t let me stop.”
“How many of these rides have you done?”
“Little more than thirty. A few people got away. I don’t know how. They stumbled out of the Barrens while they were in the daze, I guess.”
That was a lot of people to have disappeared. “The ones who lived started talking about me,” he went on. “They’re calling me Sleepy Head. Now the cop dudes and bosses want to get rid of me, because they know I’ll turn as soon as I’m in custody.”
“You should turn yourself in. I’ll go with you. You’ll be safer on the inside.”
“Meg, you know how much a prison guard makes in a year. You know how much a prison guard makes for a hit? They’d have me killed the first night.”
He was probably right.
But this sounded like murder to me. Any shred of kinship or sympathy I felt for Jordy was diminishing by the moment.
“I promise you. I had no choice.” He took out his phone and started going through his photos. “They took my daughter.” He flashed some pictures of him with a young girl, probably twelve. She looked a lot like Jordy’s grandmother. “They said they’re going to put her in the Barrens tonight, if I don’t turn myself over to them.”
“What do you think happens to them at night in the Pine Barrens?”
“I don’t think, I know. The Devil gets them.”
…
To be continued…