Damn Straight

by Elizabeth Sims

  "Did he do it?"

  "I'm certain he did. It was a screwed-up job. It didn't destroy the place, but somewhere he'd learned how to make a bomb. The investigation didn't really go anywhere, so he's free."

  "I see. You know, Skip, I wouldn't have pegged you as a guy who'd run the gauntlet at an abortion clinic."

  "How come?"

  "Well, you seem like such a straight arrow. You wear a religious symbol."

  He fingered the small cross that hung inside the V of his shirt. "Well," he said, "I've seen more than you might think. Things aren't so simple as people want them to be."

  "You said it, friend." Skip Doots was about the swellest guy I'd ever met.

  "Would you like some help?"

  "Skip, you're an absolute dreamboat, but I have to say no. I want to get friendly with Dom."

  "I understand."

  "How do I get to this clinic?"

  He told me. "So it's just maybe five miles. And the doctor's office, Dr. Fischell's, is out farther, maybe three miles more, out from town. It's all by itself next to the road. You can't miss it."

  "Is there a Salvation Army store in Pearl Center?"

  "Uh, Salvation Army? As a matter of fact there is. On Redbud Street, three blocks, I think, south of Center."

  "That's great. Thanks. I think I'll be leaving town tonight."

  "That's too bad."

  "You kidding me?"

  "No." Looking down, he pulled on his upper lip. "Theresa, I don't see any ring on your finger."

  My heart began ripping itself into shreds. Oh, hell. Hell, hell, hell. "Skip, oh. I wish we could go steady."

  "Me too."

  "But I gotta go."

  He looked at me. "One of those things, huh?"

  "Yeah."

  .

  When Truby and I were at Wayne State, we bought our housewares and clothes—except for underwear—at thrift stores, mostly Salvation Army and St. Vincent De Paul. We called them "Sally Ann's" and "Paulette's." It was fun to shop at those places; you were always surprised. Truby became a connoisseur of bowling shirts and cocktail dresses; I once found a pure-wool bathrobe for a dollar. Someday I'll tell you about my flamingo mirror.

  The Sally Ann's in Pearl Center was just the place for what I needed. It had that up-from-the-basement smell they all have. I zeroed in quickly and picked out a navy blue polyester twill skirt and a long-sleeved blouse in mauve polyester with a pattern of dark red and gold tulips on it. I added a thick acrylic cardigan in a sort of avocado shade, and found a pair of beige service oxfords that fit.

  At the last second I ran back and grabbed a head scarf, a Vera design involving fish shapes in varying shades of turquoise. I cashed out for just under ten dollars.

  Color me gorgeous, no?

  I found the abortion clinic easily, and parked around the corner. Two sentinels, a man and a woman, were on duty, sitting in lawn chairs on the sidewalk across the street from the clinic. The man was talking; both of them had a glazed look, as if they'd been sitting there forever and had no plans for later. He droned on. Whatever he was saying, she'd probably heard it a thousand times.

  I used my First Communion glide to approach the protesters. "Peace be with you," I said, interrupting.

  "You too," said Dominic Dengel, whom I recognized from the yearbook. He looked exactly the same, as raw and young and uncomprehending, but with a certain rigidity. Yes, it was that frustrated-guy anger, that hardness you see in guys whose lives have turned out drearily different from what they had expected.

  The woman said nothing. She was a farm-wife type with an impressive fluffy hairdo like a cluster of fine gold wire. She had on a white zip-up jacket with black and brown insets at the shoulders, which made her look like a linebacker. Her face was a linebacker's face, too.

  Dom Dengel slowly got up from his chair. It was a cold day but he only wore a ratty sweatshirt and jeans. The gray sky above us was equally ratty.

  The two of them looked at me with somnolent curiosity.

  I peered across the street at the clinic: a grim little office with fake-rock siding and a caduceus decal on the glass door. PRAIRIE WOMEN'S HEALTH AND FAMILY PLANNING, said the sign. Little abortion center on the prairie.

  "That's where they do it, is it?" I said.

  "Yep, that's the place," said Dengel. "The only one left in the county." He smiled thinly and offered his hand. "I'm Dom."

  "Sister Mary Theresa. How do you do, Dom?" I turned to the woman. "And how do you do? I'm Sister Mary Theresa."

  "Hi," she responded, still linebacker-faced. She held a dog-eared placard of a bloody fetus in her lap.

  "What a lovely jacket," I said.

  That got a little smile from her. "Oh! Thank you! I got it in Dayton when I went to visit my—"

  "Are you a nun, then?" said Dengel.

  "Yes, with the Little Sisters of the Catechism. Our mother house is in Green Bay."

  "Oh!"

  I saw comprehension in the faces of Dom and his companion, a shadow of understanding: Yes, this is how plainclothes nuns look. Yes, this is a nun.

  "I'm traveling around, to write a book of true stories. True stories about heroic Christians like you."

  The woman, whose name I decided had to be something like Sherri, just stared into space; Dengel, though, looked uncomfortable.

  "Well, Sister," he said, "that's nice, but I'm not really religious."

  I smiled in wonder and awe. "Why, how could you say that, Dom, when you're doing the Lord's work?"

  A car pulled into the parking lot across the street and a scrawny girl of about sixteen got out from the passenger side. Instantly, Dengel and Sherri moved to the edge of the curb and began shouting, "Murder! Bloody murder! Shame! Shame!" Sherri waved her placard.

  The girl walked stiffly to the door, eyes down. Whoever had driven her was staying in the car.

  Dengel and Sherri, still yelling, glanced my way.

  Oh, right. "Jesus loves you!" I called out. "He really does!"

  As the girl yanked open the clinic door she shrieked over her shoulder, "Fuck you! I'm just getting a Pap test!"

  Dengel turned away as she disappeared inside. "That's what they all say."

  "I gotta go pick up Tyler," Sherri said.

  I said, "We took in one of those girls once at the convent."

  "Disaster, right?" said Dengel.

  "Bless us, we didn't realize how—well, how 'street' she was."

  "Anything that wasn't nailed down, right?" Dengel shook his head wisely. "Those situations always turn out wrong. Never take one in. Never take one in."

  "I am so fed up," I said. "I just get so fed up, you know?"

  "Wait a second." Dengel went over to a derelict Chrysler Imperial parked nearby and got another folding chair out of the trunk. He carried it over for me.

  "Thank you so much, Dom."

  "See, Sister," he said, sitting carefully down, "I'm pretty much of an atheist. I'm just against the murder of little kids."

  "I see. Well, then, we actually have a great deal in common, you and me." I smiled sadly. "Do you mind if I ask how you came to be atheist?"

  He looked down silently.

  "Dom, you know—" I stopped when he looked up at me, his eyes searching mine. A car went by and honked, and without looking over he raised his hand in acknowledgment.

  "Bad things happened to me," he finally said, "that destroyed what little faith I ever had."

  "I'm very sorry, Dom. Sometimes I wonder..."

  "What?"

  "If there's a place in this world after all for people like you and me. What I mean is, oh"—I pressed my fingers to my temples—"I just don't feel like I fit in."

  "Over at the convent?"

  "Most times, I agree, you know, the church says we should be loving all the time, turn the other cheek, but sometimes I get so mad—"

  "Yeah?"

  He was suspicious of me, I felt it, but his drive to tell his story to a virgin audience would win out over his reservations ab
out a stranger. I don't know how it came to me, but I have a knack for getting people to tell me things. I've never fully understood it, but there it is.

  I said, "I get so mad that I want to do things."

  "Yeah?"

  "Thoughts come into my head, and I get so darned angry..."

  He watched me closely, breathless.

  I closed my eyes. Softly, I said, "I want to kill these people. I want them to beg for their lives, and then I want them to die screaming, and I want them to descend into hell. I know it's wrong, but sometimes it seems...so right. So very right. I don't suppose you can relate to that."

  "Well, I—"

  "Sometimes I feel my faith slipping. That's why I'm writing this book."

  "Mm-hmm. Yeah! I've heard of these rogue nuns. So you're a rogue nun, huh?"

  "I learned that a brave soul bombed this clinic once." I smiled a little tiny smile, a halfway kind of smile from beneath my eyelashes.

  "Well," said Dengel, "see where that siding looks different around that window?"

  "Yes, yes, I do."

  "Well, that's where the bomb went in and then blew it out, that place there. They patched it. You can still see a little soot up high, see, by the rain gutter?"

  "Oh, my dear. What did—do you know what was used?"

  Sherri reaffirmed, "I gotta go pick up Tyler, and then Gary's taking us for pizza."

  Dengel ignored her. "Let's just say there are people around here who know things about explosives."

  "Yet the clinic still stands."

  "The device should've been more incendiary. The problem is, the more fire you want, the bigger and heavier the bomb has to be. The more there needs to be in it, you know?"

  "Oh."

  The afternoon was growing chillier. A few buzzards circled high beyond the rooftops, out over the prairie. It was a quiet time in East Horton.

  "Dom, tell me something—"

  "I'm on disability."

  "Huh?"

  "I had cancer. Before that, the thing was—"

  "Dom, did someone hurt you?"

  He looked into my eyes deep, real deep. "Sister, it's like you know me. Usually, a woman needs to give me a massage before she can really know me."

  I suppressed a shudder.

  "Sister, sister—uh, I'm sorry?"

  "Theresa. Mary Theresa."

  "Sister Theresa, I was hurt bad. It happened when I was too young to know how to protect myself. I'm the kind of man who loves kids. I'm the kind of man who wants to be a father. I think about a lot of things when I'm sitting out here. I'm a very competitive person. When I do something, I do it to win."

  "Was it a girl? Someone you loved very much?"

  "How do you know?"

  "Dom, I might be a nun, but I wasn't born yesterday."

  He chuckled gratefully.

  I said, "It was a girl, then, and it was about a child you wanted."

  "Yeah. I'd have a son today if she hadn't—"

  "Killed it, right? I see. Where is this girl—woman now?"

  He snorted. "You'd never believe it. Never in a million years."

  He was spilling it, so easily and purely.

  I assured him, "I have all the time in the world."

  "We both came from the same shithole on this prairie—pardon my French—and what do you think? She's big now, she's a big star. Wealthy, very wealthy. She got out and left me here."

  "A movie star?"

  "Not exactly. I'm not—I can't—let me put it this way." He leaned close to my ear. Sherri was just sitting there nearby; I judged she must have heard all of this, but somehow he wanted a measure of privacy, if only for show. "I'm going to pay her a visit real soon. It's time she remembered me. She thinks everything's over, done. But I'm not going to stand by and let her ruin my life."

  "Do you have friends who help you, sometimes?"

  "I do. That I do. You'd be surprised how far and wide my friends reach."

  "And they help you in return for..."

  "I help them with information."

  "Like, how to do certain things?"

  "Yeah."

  "Dom, I want to know, could you—have you ever loved anyone else?"

  "Love's got nothing to do with it. Not anymore. I got cancer. I got cancer in the you-know-where—pardon my French again—and I can't have any kids anymore. I used to think, big deal. But now I know different. Now I know what it means to give your name to a new generation. I learned."

  "He wants to get inseminated," Sherri said.

  "What?" I said.

  "That isn't it," Dengel said. "It's that I saved some of my sperm, you know—they saved it for me, and I can still have a kid if I can find somebody to, you know, get impregnated. Who'll agree to do it."

  Involuntarily, I glanced over at Sherri. She quickly stared at the cracked pavement.

  "It costs money, see, to get somebody to do it, who doesn't know you. Not like somebody who would just want to do it out of...out of—"

  I said, "Love? Or idealism?"

  "Yeah." He shot a dirty look at Sherri.

  She leaned forward in her lawn chair, grunted, and got up. "I gotta go pick up Tyler."

  "See ya tomorrow."

  "See ya tomorrow."

  "Nice to meet you," I chimed.

  She looked back at me with a totally fake smile.

  "It's expensive," said Dengel, "and I'm on disability. I used to have a good job. I ran an equipment place."

  "Oh. And if you can get some money from the one who hurt you—"

  "It's caring, not money." Suddenly, his eyes narrowed and his whole body tensed. "I'm the last of the Dengels! Sister, do you have any idea of what that means to a man? My old man said, 'Son, you've got to carry on the family name. You've got four sisters! I had four sisters! Don't let me down!' On his deathbed he told me that. Now what am I supposed to do? I'd have married her! I loved her! I'd have offered to marry her if I knew she was gonna—or if I knew I was gonna get cancer, I'd have married her!"

  Genie Dengel. I shook my head sadly.

  Dengel went on, "I mean, money is a sidelight of caring. If she cared, she'd spring loose a little money, or she'd do it herself."

  "Do it? You mean get inseminated with your—"

  "Yeah. I bet I could convince her, given the..."

  "The?"

  "The right situation. You know?"

  Chapter 22

  After leaving Dengel with a promise to keep in touch, I stopped at a gas station and used the pay phone to call Dr. Fischell's office.

  "My husband," I told the friendly receptionist, "was a patient of Dr. Fischell's before we moved to Cicero—uh, that would be fifteen years ago. Sixteen years. He never bothered to ask Dr. Fischell to send on his records, but now he's got cancer and—"

  "Oh, no!" The receptionist was the sweetest old thing. I pictured her with honestly gray hair, a partial bridge, and her glasses on a chain around her neck. This receptionist kept a cardigan sweater handy, to drape over her shoulders when she got chilly.

  "Yes, and the oncology doctors want to see his records—I don't know what for. Can you send them right to me? Because we're flying next week to the Mayo Clinic."

  "Oh, absolutely, Mrs.—?"

  "I'm Mrs. Kenneth Johnston—t-o-n. Do you keep records for so long, then?"

  "Oh, we absolutely do! We—"

  "And you have them right in the office?"

  "Oh, absolutely! Dr. Fischell has every file on every patient, from the first day he opened his office after the war. I'm sure I can find them quickly. Let me just..."

  I wondered which war she meant. After giving her a fake address I drove out of town to the office, which, as described by Skip Doots, was miles from nowhere. I was lucky; it was getting close to five o'clock. The building was a small neat brick one. I pulled in to the gravel parking lot and popped in just for a sec.

  Using a high little voice, I told the receptionist, "I'm trying to find Pearl Center, and I think I'm badly lost."

  "Oh,
you're not lost at all! Not the least bit!" Her smile was overwhelmingly reassuring, as though she just had all this good will pent up inside her. She wore her glasses on a chain around her neck; her cardigan was neatly folded on a shelf behind her. I am so good.

  "It's such a lonesome road," I whined.

  "Oh, you poor thing! You're almost there! Eight miles, right straight on. You'll go through East Horton first, and you'll see a sign? Class D hockey champs. Then you'll go over some railroad tracks, then..."

  She gave me deluxe directions as I cased the joint. No alarm system at all, it appeared. I saw no control panel, no sensors. Just a stout front door and a good lock.

  Back in the car, I circled the building before peeling out, and I noticed a rear door and a few side windows. The building was flanked by a bed of low evergreen shrubs set off by a cobblestone border. Stubble fields stretched off in both directions along the road; woods grew up to the doctor's property from behind. Across the road, a few snarly acres of brush; a farmhouse sagged, weather-beaten and abandoned, amidst them.

  I really started to hold my breath at this point, because now everything depended on what I'd find in that office.

  I drove southeast toward Chicago, as the afternoon waned. I was hungry. I saw a McDonald's sign and reflexively turned off, then decided to keep going a little ways. Eventually, I stopped at a Szechuan restaurant. The cashew chicken I ordered was good, and so was the hot tea; I took my time.

  When I came out it was seven o'clock and dark, but not late enough yet. In the car in the darkened parking lot I changed back into my jeans, sweater, and pea coat, also my Weejuns. It felt good to put on my old red sweater again. Sister Mary Theresa got dumped into the trash bin at McDonald's. I drove around Chicagoland for a while, taking the I-290 all the way downtown, then picking up the Kennedy to the Edens. Then I cut west again somewhere around Waukegan. Déjà vu set in as I remembered driving around just like this in Detroit, settling my nerves before a task just like this, some few years back. That break-in had been dangerous from the get-go—highly dangerous—but this one ought to be a slice of pie: No homicidal maniacs were out to get me, no would-be paramour was stalking me. Still, it gets your nerves when you're planning to break the law, when you're planning to go creeping around a strange place in the dark.