Innocent Monster by Reed Farrel Coleman Read Free Book Online

lurking at the local pub. This was still Howdy Doody-ville and the beach was literally just across the street from Sashi’s house.
    I was about to leave when I caught sight of someone coming up the beach in my direction. He was an old man dressed in washed-out jeans, a faded Mets hat, and sweater against the cold. White-skinned, thin as a sheet of paper, he walked along the water’s edge seemingly searching for something, something I could not see. Trailing behind him was a dog, a bleached-out retriever even more ancient than the man himself. I hesitated to approach him or to call to him for fear of breaking his concentration, but then he looked up as if sensing my presence and gave me a snappy wave.
    “Morning,” he said, turning to me. He had bright blue eyes, a crooked mouth, and cigarette teeth more yellow than his dog’s coat. “Chilly day.”
    “Cold, yeah.”
    “I don’t know you.”
    “No, you don’t.” I pointed back at the Bluntstones’ house. “I’m looking into the little girl’s disappearance.”
    His yellow teeth disappeared behind taut lips. “Shame, that. I used to see her here all the time with that goofy beagle of hers. Sad little girl.”
    “Moe Prager,” I said and thrust out my right hand.
    He gave it a short, firm shake. “Ben Schare.”
    “So, you guys talked.”
    “Not really. We just used to sort of walk together along the beach with our dogs trailing behind us. We said hello and all and sometimes she might say that something was pretty or ugly, but not much else. Sometimes she’d be out here talking on her cell phone to her friends.”
    “But you said she was sad. How do you know that if you didn’t talk?”
    “Come on, son, you’ve lived a little. You know. It’s a feeling. She just seemed lonely and sad. Nothing I can point to directly, but when that beagle of hers croaked...”
    “What about that?”
    “Then it wasn’t guessing about her being sad. She was positively abandoned. I used to see her sometimes walking alone down here and when I would wave, she’d turn and go. I don’t think she could bear seeing me and the old lady back there.” He turned to look at the slow-moving dog behind him. “She don’t have much time left, but she still loves to be near the water. It’s a comfort to her, I think, even though she don’t go in anymore.”
    “She remembers, you think?”
    “She remembers. Come on, old girl,” he said and turned to head in the other direction. “Nice meeting you, son.”
    “Take care, Ben.”
    I watched Ben and his dog retreat slowly down the beach in the opposite direction. As they went, I thought about how Ben had described Sashi, how everyone seemed to describe her: a sad little girl. Thinking about that erased the thirty years that had passed since I was looking for Patrick Maloney. The thing of it is is that when you’re looking for someone, anyone, you get to know them only through other people’s eyes. As it was with Patrick, so it would be with Sashi: other people’s eyes. Yes, I’d watched the video of her painting, but I had seen too much in my life to mistake a snippet of someone’s life as their life or to believe that a camera has no point of view. There’s always someone standing behind a camera. When my vision blurred and Ben and his dog became indistinct shadows, I left the beach too.

East Village Vox February 21, 1994

Maxed Out “Wagner’s Ring Ding” A Must Miss
    BY EVANGELINE MANHEIM
    Touted as the next great performance artist by devotees of the emerging Williamsburg scene, the rather unfortunately named Max Bluntstone lived down to his name and proved to be yet another Brooklyn import not quite ready for the bright lights of Manhattan. In fact, he proved not quite ready for the dim lights of Camden.
    At last night’s premier of “Wagner’s Ring Ding” at the Out House on the Bowery, Bluntstone even failed at failing. No mean feat, that. I suppose the audience might have booed had Bluntstone given them a