Our Lady of Infidelity

by Jackie Parker

  “How about taking your car through the wash?” says Walt.

  “What car? I’m not driving my car. That’s the whole point. I’ve got the loaner. Platz is about to send the highway patrol to come get me—and it.”

  Walt laughs nervously but then sees she’s not joking. She is drawn and deflated; under whatever tensions she’s been living, the beauty of her face has collapsed.

  “I thought you had it all worked out with Platz.”

  “I don’t have anything worked out.”

  “I thought Father Bill said—”

  “Yes, well, and I thought Father Bill said you were ready to hire me.”

  Now Walt is trying to fix her in a life he has no information to build from. He remembers the evening at Father Bill’s as a haze of good feeling and overeating and very little else, except when he’d caught her chair. Something elusive had opened inside him in her presence that evening. Now it’s closed. What he feels now is a familiar tightness around his chest, a sensation that brings his old life back in a rush. This is how he used to go through each day, in the armor. Why is the armor up now? Right behind the couch he sees the reason, not two feet from them, leaning against the wall. He is simply protecting his window. Its right to stay on the floor.

  The office door opens and Walt looks toward it with relief. A customer will make it easier for him to let her go. And go she will, he realizes, he will surely not see her after this. But it is not a customer, it is Bryant Platz.

  “I had to be here for it,” Platz says and struts to the center of the office, his usual room-conquering walk. He crosses his heavily tattooed arms. On his left arm a concatenated coil of green serpents compete for top snake. His unzipped leather vest is open to the navel, his skin deeply tanned. He looks Zoe over as if she is something for sale.

  “I dig your work clothes, kid. Nice leg. So, are we going to get down to it sometime this morning? Some of us have to get back to work. They’re waiting across the street for the go.”

  “What go?” Walt asks.

  Zoe is standing, the hammer resting against her thigh. As she picks it up, she can feel its full weight pulling her down. Like her life is pulling her. Nowhere and down. The wall where the window should be is blank and ugly. Such shoddy construction, it would only take a few swings, though if she connects with a stud, it might mean disaster, but she has stepped out of consequence into action. Even the weight of the hammer is her ally; gravity reversing itself as it rises upward from metal through wood and into her grip. She takes four quick strides to the wall, pulls the hammer behind her like a batter about to take on a wild pitch. Platz jumps back.

  When the hammer hits wall, she is thinking of Walt, of that stubborn resistance that deserves to be smashed. She is thinking of the absence of Michael. The rage arrives in red force. She has so many reasons to smash through that wall! Out they come like horses through the gate. Walt calls, “Zoe! Zoe! Slow down!” But she is not Zoe, she is nameless—the unstoppable instrument of right action and the correct transfer of six hundred dollars—her arm moving with an abandon she has never allowed in the thirty-one years of her carefully constructed, misfortune-plagued life.

  The wallboard yields quickly. Plaster dust and bits of board sail past her like tiny fragments of bone. Soon a three-foot hole has been opened, through which the freeway traffic, the hulking glass front of the diner, and the little hacienda of the Infidelity Motel are now visible. When she puts down the hammer and turns to face Walt, she sees the face of a man hit by something he has never imagined.

  I have become Michael, Zoe thinks, I have the power to ruin things.

  “I just lost forty bucks on you,” Platz says and smacks Walt on the back, “Way to go.”

  When the first group from the diner comes in to see for themselves, they find Walt on his knees with a hand vacuum, sucking plaster dust off the cushions of that vast velvet couch now smack in the middle of his office. Behind him, through a wall of clear plastic, Zoe picks at the top of the gaping hole with a small, unseen tool, a miner afraid of a cave-in. With her features hidden by goggles, her hair tucked into a cap, she doesn’t look much like those rumors they have been hearing ad infinitum at breakfast. She is tall, all right, but entirely lacking in glamour. The reports about her have been exaggerated.

  She works hours undoing the damage of her hasty rough opening, measuring and re-measuring from outside and in. Chipping at plaster, shoring up studs. It is hours before she first begins sawing the frame for the header and late afternoon before she pushes aside the plastic sheeting and steps through, walks past the spectators who have camped on the couch to say that the framing is level and square.

  “Is that good?” Walt asks.

  For the first time in days Zoe laughs. “I’ll say. Now I’m going to need help.”

  “Take your pick,” Walt says.

  The men on the couch guffaw.

  “You,” she says pointing at Chico Platz, Platz’s stepkid, the only one with a sober expression. The men laugh as Chico looks around. “Me?” Sixteen and bookish, concave chest, arms with no weight. “That’s right, you,” Zoe says. “Ten dollars an hour—are you game?”

  Zoe has done this for years. She knows a good worker, careful eyes, steady hands. No cowboys, thank you.

  The foot traffic in his office is something to see, including the people who tell him he’s crazy for opening a drive-thru thousand-watt car wash instead of a regular one. But no Father Bill in the throng. No Josefina and Luz.

  By the end of the day, in spite of himself, even Walt has joined in the general good feeling. By dint of his decision to put in that window, he has earned Chico Platz fifty dollars and Emily Otto one hundred twenty—the really big bettor in the diner pool. He has brought to an end the subject of yearlong speculation. Will Walt ever put in that window? And right now in the hottest hour of the day before the winds and the rare but hoped-for thirty-degree temperature drop of midsummer before a threatened thunderstorm, an event of some note is occurring in a place where not much of note has occurred since Luz Reyes disappeared from school and was found at the campgrounds. There are some who will say it was all because of a beautiful woman, that Walt could never have decided without her. But however it happened, in ten hours or so Walt Adair has managed to revise a three-year reputation. In putting in that window, he has become a new man.

  “Take your time,” Walt says when Zoe sweeps back the plastic wall and comes out to say she’s got a problem with the header. “Take all the time you need. I’m sure you can solve it.”

  He is loosened by laughter, the sheer number of people who have stopped by his car wash. He even finds himself wondering why he made such a big deal out of something so small and simple. He can look or not look through the window, and if he prefers the traffic of his mind, that’s what he will have.

  When she’s through, he checks it thoroughly, first on the sidewalk and then inside. To his eye it looks perfect. Even and plumb. Aside from the new raw stucco, the window looks quite unremarkable, like something that has always been there. He will show Zoe his gratitude, he thinks. He will at least buy her a dinner.

  They are greeted with smiles at the diner, given the best front booth, served by Bobbie herself. They eat cornbread-stuffed chicken breast, a golden-beet salad with poppy seed dressing. They drink a bottle of Bobbie’s twelve-dollar best house wine. And they can’t take their eyes off the window on the opposite side of the freeway, straining to see it in the headlights of the cars once it has grown dark.

  In the end Walt Adair gives Zoe two hundred more than she’d asked and is amazed to see her eyes well up when he hands her the bills. She leaves him then, to drive up to Platz at the garage. If you need a place to stay I’ve got an empty trailer just waiting, he thinks. But too late. She’s gone.

  When he returns to his office, it is only to attend to his sign, which he has forgotten to turn off. The meal and the wine have made him groggy and he goes inside the office. Under the window is a startling spill of bl
ue, an entirely new phenomenon, the result of the light from his exterior sign coming through the glass and hitting the carpet. The couch is still where he pushed it, in the middle of the room. He takes a six-pack of Sam Adams from the half-fridge under his counter and settles back on the couch, imagining Zoe were there to look at the view with him, the homely but well put-in window, the bonus of blue light awash on the floor. He watches a few cars go by, then finds himself reaching toward Zoe in his mind trying to pull her back. The office is clean now; she had organized a bunch of the watchers and they had gotten up all the plaster dust and splinters of wood. The plastic wall taken down and removed, every last tube of caulk cleared out. She was good. He had enjoyed watching her handle the men. She was used to it, he reminds himself. She has her own shop, “kitchen cabinets mostly,” as she’d told them at Father Bill’s little dinner.

  Now he sees her out on the freeway headed for the garage. She had called Platz and asked him to meet her. She wanted to give him the money that night. He hopes it all goes well with Platz, that he doesn’t give her a hard time about the loaner, hopes that she makes it safely to the campgrounds, and that wherever she sleeps, she sleeps well. He thinks of odd jobs he might give her, or others who might need her help. Of the steady way she worked and how much he’d enjoyed it. Now it is late, nearly ten. If he does not get up, he will surely conk out on the couch and ruin his chances for an uninterrupted rest. A few minutes later, he still has not moved. When he hears Zoe call to him, a thrill unfurls in the center of his chest. He goes to the door, glad he has stayed, certain he’ll find her standing on his step in the dark, but no one is there.

  CHAPTER 3

  Though there are many who say when they looked it was even—how plumb the sides, how level the sill, how long the wait as Zoe measured and remeasured, made perfect the header, fiddled for the ninety-fifth time with every detail of the framing before that window went in, and though no one disputes that even the flashing has been hidden exceptionally well, how did they miss what was obvious? What they see now they must have failed to see then: Walt’s window is crooked. Its upper right corner slants three inches higher than its left.

  In the clear light of high desert morning, no one can deny the window in Walt’s car wash is a spectacular botch.

  “She tricked him. I knew it. So every man of principle is undone by a woman of passion,” spouts Platz holding court at the diner in his usual window booth, where the usual breakfast crowd sits. Their faces are upturned, their eggs are congealing; his words are gospel. This is the man who has seen Zoe Luedke strike the first blow to the wall.

  “Made no move to stop her. Walt just let her swing.” He shows them the motion. “Bam! Bam! Then you know what Walt says? ‘What the hell. I guess there’s no going back.’ That man was played by a woman, just like she tried to play me.”

  As soon as they’ve eaten, the diner crowd drives four lanes across to the car wash, illegal U turns be damned. Marches up Walt’s walk and into his too chilly office to gawk once again at the strange-angled window—this time from the inside—get their two rotten cents in, and laugh.

  But the children of Infidelity are another story entirely. And many Infidelity kids are brought by to see it that day. What a relief such a wrong public thing is, much worse than a letter drawn backward or an out loud reading mistake, or getting caught pinching or punching your sister, or spitting at someone, or losing a toy or a bracelet, or saying bad words to a friend. Or any of the secret humiliations they suffer. Sleep will come easier to the children that night, and for months when an Infidelity child draws a house, one window will decidedly slant.

  It’s the onslaught of kids (already his biggest fans wash-wise) who bring Walt some relief, their laughter, their pointing, their begging their parents, “Now can we get our car washed?” August the eighth will break records at Immaculate Autos, and his off-kilter window’s the cause. By late afternoon, Walt has thrown up his hands, embraced the mistake, and let himself join in the fun.

  By then Walt has left three messages for Father Bill and has not yet heard back and is beginning to wonder if the priest is deliberately refusing his calls.

  Then Wren and Emily Otto show up for their regular Friday wash. At ninety-three, Wren is surely the best-groomed man in Infidelity, wears a tie every day, always the same kind, Prussian blue silk with fine red stripes. He owns a half-dozen, all the same. “The business of the day is worth dressing for, no matter how hot the weather,” Wren had advised Walt when he first arrived in Infidelity. Wren liked Walt’s blue cotton oxfords. His wife liked the comment so much she cross-stitched it into a pillow and made one for Walt. He’s got it back at the house.

  “A human mistake. That was me sixty-two years back,” Wren says. “She kept with me, nonetheless.”

  “Not to mention what you stood for with me.”

  “She’s too modest. Emily was always perfect.”

  “See how he does? The sad thing is, he believes it. And me with those teeth and that temper? You forget everything in time. Come on honey, let’s clean the Cutlass and have us a cry.”

  And off they go to the wash.

  Walt has himself quite a line of customers waiting by the time Father Bill finally calls, and his place is noisy. With a couple of little kids skipping around, Walt is feeling quite good, juggling three things at once, swiping credit cards, trying to delay a first-timer so he can explain the Immaculate Autos experience, and waving to that little red-headed curly-haired on-again off-again friend of Luz’s whose name he forgets, to go take her soda, it’s free today. The red-headed mother insists on paying for it, sliding a dollar over the counter.

  “I’m tied up,” he says to Father Bill. He’s heard about the window, Walt thinks. He is going to try to make it up to me. Another dinner invitation, maybe and then with a rush, Walt thinks of Zoe beside him at Father Bill’s table. How quickly the body forgets. His mind has to remind it she’s taken his money for an incompetent job. “I’m having quite a big day.”

  When Father Bill says he is calling from the hospital, Walt automatically thinks of Luz, rescued from the campgrounds in June. The priest is relaying instructions. Reminding Walt how to get to the hospital. Telling Walt where to meet them. Walt’s heartbeat quickens and before he even puts down the phone he is in crisis mode, making plans to close down his car wash while he reviews the route to the High Desert Hospital. Straight down the freeway, no turns. The last time he was there it was early June. He had gone on his own when he heard Luz had been found. The whole town half crazy: a disappeared child. No one yet knows how she got to the campgrounds, much less why. If Father Bill or Josefina had found out the answer, they had kept it to themselves.

  Right away he calls the Platzs trying to locate Chico. If Walt can get him, he might be able to keep his wash open. If he can’t, he will simply tell his customers to come back tomorrow; he must close down the wash.

  “Sure,” says Bryant’s wife, Patty. Chico’s here doing nothing. Hang on.”

  There is rush hour traffic on the freeway by the time Walt leaves the car wash. He waits for the air conditioning to take hold in the Civic. His old driving impatience makes the blood beat in his head as it used to on his daily commute. When he thinks of having just handed over the wash to a seventeen-year-old, he wonders why he didn’t just close down, then remembers how busy it was, customers he has not seen in months, some not ever. Father Bill had not even said whether it was Josefina or Luz.

  When Walt passes the sign for the campgrounds, he flushes, humiliated. She had to have known it would tilt, he thinks, seeing Zoe’s face in his mind’s eye. But by the time he gets through Twenty-Nine Palms, he is too focused on what he will find in the hospital to give Zoe more than a passing ill thought. If Josefina’s the one who is sick, he may finally learn the reason for her frequent withdrawals. For sometimes as long as a week she just disappears, does not go to work, takes no phone calls. Father Bill takes over with Luz and no explanations. Maybe now he’ll find out what’s be
hind all that. He should be above curiosity, thinking solely of Josefina’s well being, but he’s not. No one knows anything about them. Their past never mentioned, not even to him, the only one in Infidelity who is included in Father Bill’s dinners at the rectory.

  One night, after too much wine, Josefina had spoken of her student days in El Salvador. She had been a medical student at the university, she said. Walt was shocked, though not because she is unintelligent, simply because it was a revelation that gave him a new way to think of her, one that has left him wanting to know more. Now she cleans houses. Something is wrong. Lots of things, probably. He can’t make it fit. Another time, when he mentioned his bankruptcy, she had asked about the scope of his holdings. “Too bad you could not hold on for longer,” she said. “Land in a good place is always of value in the long run. My father used to say that. Of course, when he said it I laughed.”

  He had wanted to ask about her father that night, what he did for a living, even, but she had not offered anything other than that single sentence. He only knows this: Josefina has no more family. Father Bill told him that, but not how it happened. And often when they are together there is Luz sitting at the table, taking everything in.

  “All right,” he says as he sees the sign for the hospital and then the High Desert Hospital itself. He looks for directions to the parking lot. Why are they so hard to find? God, he hopes it’s not Luz. It has to be bad if he’s been called.

  They are sitting together on a bench in the lobby, where the receptionist in the emergency room suggested he look. He was flustered and could not remember where Father Bill said to meet them. It is a small hospital, unusually quiet, but the lobby seems vast, the floor long and white, the air conditioning a shock to the system. The first thing he notices is her hair, which is wild and undone. He has never seen Luz without the neat braids. The second, when he gets closer, are the droplets of blood on Father Bill’s chino pants.