Ramona tried to comfort Rex, tried to pull that wispy-haired head to her chest, but Rex was not a big one for hugs. He flailed, fighting his way out of her embrace. He stalked back into the house with Ramona in pursuit.
I made my way onto the lawn. The open end of the bag rustled and blew in a little breeze. I touched the black plastic, but decided not to look inside. I didn’t need to look inside. The dark red stains on the driveway were enough.
After a minute, I went to the house and knocked. I ended up knocking quite a few times, and just as I was about to leave, Ramona came to to the door. She looked like hell.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “This is not a good time.”
“Is Rex okay?”
She closed her eyes for a second as if it pained her to even hear such a stupid question. “Not really. No, he’s not okay at all.” Rex bellowed from the other side of the house. “I’ll be right there!” she shouted back. She touched my arm. “I need to . . .”
“I understand,” I said.
It kind of killed me, seeing Rex having to go through something like that. Nothing’s harder than losing a pet that you love, and if you’re old and alone, it makes it even worse.
Dranka had hated the dog (I hadn’t been that fond of it myself), but from what I had seen, it looked like what happened had just been one of those freaky accidents. Not that anyone was ever going to convince Rex of that. It was a mess all the way around.
But what had really gotten my attention was all that stuff Dranka had shouted at him over the roof of her car. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was all idle threats. People will say all kinds of crap when they’ve just been axed. But this was different. This sounded like she really had the goods on the guy.
I got to the Fiction Institute about noon the next day. A safari guide type with a parrot on his shoulder sat in the foyer, waiting for his appointment with Ramona, but everybody else seemed to be at lunch, which made it easy enough to go through Mildred’s desk and find the list of Rex’s emergency numbers. Just under a long column of cardiologists, lawyers, agents, and repairmen was penciled in Dranka Zivanovic, cook, with both phone number and address.
I tried to call, and when I didn’t get an answer I drove to South Austin to see if I could find her.
Dranka lived in a small stucco house in a seriously funky neighborhood. Two doors down, a half-naked man balanced on one leg in his backyard, waving his arms, doing his Asian thing, and across the street, a hundred strings of colored bottle caps rotated from the branches of trees.
Dranka had a chain-link fence and a plastic pink flamingo tilted over a cheesy water feature. I let myself in the gate and made my way warily across the dead lawn. When you’re dealing with a woman who’s just run over a puppy, you can’t be too careful.
I knocked several times on the door of the screen porch, but no one showed up. Her car was parked on the street, so I figured she had to be around. I cupped my hands to my eyes and peered through the screen. There were at least a couple lights on.
I eased around the side of the house. Edging between a couple of recycling bins, I glanced through a window and was startled to see Dranka at her kitchen counter, whacking away at a bloody slab of meat with an enormous knife. She must have sensed my presence, because she turned and glowered at me.
I raised a hand in greeting. She flailed the knife in the air, waving me away. I gave her my most winning smile and put both palms up to show her what a mean-no-harm kind of guy I was. I pointed to her, then to myself, made little yak-yak signs with my fingers to let her know I wanted to talk.
She began shouting something I couldn’t make out and went storming off toward the rear of the house. I moved quickly, making it to the back steps just as she came stumbling out onto her deck.
“Go on!” she shouted. “Get out of here! I’ve had it with whole bunch of you!”
“Dranka, I want to tell you how sorry I am about all this . . .”
“Sorry? How could you be sorry? A big man like you . . .” She still had the knife in her hand and her apron was flecked with blood.
“Just listen to me for a second,” I said. “I’m here to help.”
“Why you want to help? You’re all the same, you famous writers. We little ants to you. You like to set match to us, see us fry. I have no job. Sixty years old. What am I going to do?”
“That’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Everybody think Rex Schoeninger such a great man. That I should be proud to work for national monument. What do they know? He is hard man. Cold as iceberg. He worse than Tito.”
“You think I don’t know that?” I said. “That guy destroyed my writing career. Oh, we all know how he likes to act like Mr. Good Guy, but he’s got a mean streak a mile wide. He said terrible things about me. Why do you think we didn’t speak for twenty-five years?”
That stopped her for a moment. The idea that the two of us might somehow be kindred spirits took a while to digest. “He have no right, firing me.”
“Hey, you’re preaching to the choir, sweetheart,” I said.
She tested the edge of her knife with a thumb, then set it down on a window ledge. She pinched a dead leaf off one of the potted plants, and her face softened with regret.
“It was an accident. That little dog, you know how he could be. He pee everywhere, hop on furniture, when I hang up laundry, he tear it off line. When I try to upbraid him, Rex say, do not upbraid him, he is just puppy, so I do what he say, but he like wilderness dog, run inside, outside, under table, nobody can keep track where he is.”
“So what happened exactly?”
For a moment I wasn’t sure she was going to answer me. “I cook Rex his supper. It was late. I tired, I want to go home, but he want me to run by the pharmacy first. They have little chocolate mints, his all-time favorites. All I want to do is go home, lift my feet up, watch my show, but what can I do?
“I go out and get in the car. Maybe I in a bad mood, maybe I in a hurry, I don’t know. All I thinking is, Chocolate mints, chocolate mints. I squeeze the gas. I hear this yelp, then crunch. It sound like you take a bunch of sticks in your hands and break them all at once.”
“Oh, Jesus, Dranka.”
“I get out of car. Look underneath. At first I don’t see anything. I still hoping I run over cardboard box. But then I see him. He look so small, lying there. I didn’t know what to do. I knew Rex never believe it accident. My mind go many miles every hour. All I can think, I can’t let him know this. I check up and down the street. No one. I think, if I can get rid of the dog, Rex will think it just run away, it will be better for all of us.” She grimaced, rubbing the hell out of her elbow. She was coming to the part she wasn’t so proud of. “So I got a garbage bag from the garage.”
“I know,” I said. “I saw.”
“You saw?”
“I was sitting across the street. In my car.”
Taken aback, she glared at me as if I was some kind of traitor. “So you saw everything, then.”
“I saw the bag move.”
“It was dead! It was dead! I swear to you! But sometimes, dead things, they twitch. For a long time.”
The sun was directly in my eyes. I squinted up at her, grinding my heel into the dead grass. “I’m sure it must have been horrible,” I said.
Something strange was happening to her face. Her eyes went wide with what looked like alarm, her lower lip curled down, and she started to grimace. It took me several seconds to realize that she was crying. She wasn’t good at it. She turned away from me.
“I’m sorry, Dranka,” I said.
She turned back to face me, full of scorn. “Oh, you say that already. Everybody say they sorry. But nobody as sorry as Dranka.” She wiped away her tears angrily. “You want a drink?”
“That might be good,” I said.
She showed me into the kitchen and got a couple of shot glasses and a bottle of slivovitz out of the cupboard. It looked as if she was in the middle of some serious
cooking—pots and skillets everywhere, a hacked-up shoulder of lamb on the counter, ringed by potatoes, garlic cloves, celery, onions, a bunch of herbs and spices.
We sat down at the table and she poured us each a shot of the plum brandy. Leaning across the table, we toasted God knows what.
“So would you like me to speak to him?” I said.
“What for?” she said. “He never going to hire me back. Why would I want to work for him anyway? He’s an old man, he starting to lose his mind. All day, all he does is sit in his room and type, type, type. And yell at me. Dranka, get me this, Dranka, get me that. But he will pay for this. He is going to pay.”
I sipped at the slivovitz. “I heard you say that. But, really, Dranka, what could you possibly do?” I said.
“I know things about him.”
“I know things about him too. What I know is that he is the most boring man in America. I’ll bet you ten dollars he’s never jaywalked in his life. Rex is one of those guys who put their hand over their heart when they sing the national anthem.”
She stared at me for a second, then polished off her drink, got up, and went back to the counter. I watched her cube the shoulder of lamb with a series of expert strokes.
“Here you go, vegetarian boy, chew on this.” She snapped off a stalk of celery and tossed it to me. It was crisp and tasteless. “He not the man you think he is.”
“Who is?” I said.
I put my celery stalk down on the table and poured myself another brandy. The house was small and dark. A single parakeet rustled in a birdcage in the hallway. The walls were plastered with cornball paintings on glass of peasants strangling geese and dancing around haystacks. Dranka shook a pile of salt, pepper, and paprika onto a large platter.
“He do some bad, bad things,” she said.
“And most of them he did to me,” I said. “I’m sorry, Dranka, but if this is the best you’ve got, I wouldn’t get my hopes up.”
I was pleased to see that she was getting pissed. Rolling the nuggets of lamb in the spices, she looked back at me like I was a naïve little fuck. “You know he was married before?”
“I guess I knew that.”
“Four times.”
“So? That’s not bad, but it’s not exactly a record.”
She lopped off a hunk of butter, letting it drop into a frying pan, and bent low to adjust the flame. “His second wife, she big drinker. They have terrible trouble, but all the same, they adopt a little boy. Like idiot, they think it will solve everything. But it only make everything worse. When they get divorce, she get baby.” She moved the melting butter around in the pan with a wooden spoon. I nursed my drink, brooding.
“This woman, she have no business raising a baby by herself. She go back to judge, make a big scene, crying, carrying on about how she can’t do this. So the judge ask Mr. Schoeninger if he can take boy. He say no. He have too many great books to write.”
I glanced at her. She had to be making this up. After what he’d done to her, she was willing to say anything. All the same, she had me going. I’m an orphan, and as far as I’m concerned, throwing an orphan out in the street is something you should burn in hell for. She took the platter of lamb and dropped the tiny cubes into the skillet. They made a low hissing sound, like an aroused snake.
“Where is this boy now?”
“Nobody know. A couple of years ago, Rex start to feel bad about this. He hire a detective to find the boy, but so far, nothing.”
I picked up the stalk of celery and took another bite. It tasted like wood. “You have any proof of this?”
“Oh, I have proof, all right.”
“What kind of proof?”
She looked back over her shoulder at me, her eyes shining like a sly little girl. “I make copies of everything.” She sidestepped back to the stove and began to stir the meat.
“Are you going to show me?” I asked.
She corralled a cube of lamb with the spoon and lifted it to her mouth. She blew on it a couple times and took a careful bite. “You want me to show you?”
“Show me? You bet I would.”
She wiped her fingers on her soiled apron. “You stay right there.”
After she left the room, I sat for a minute, rolling my shot glass back and forth between my palms. The smell of roasting meat slowly filled the room. If what she’d said was true, it would be huge, just what I’d been looking for. But as funny as it sounds, there was a part of me that didn’t want it to be true. I sort of liked Rex, and if Dranka was right, there was a side of him that was way uglier and more fucked up than I’d ever bargained for.
I went to the stove and snuck a plump piece of lamb. It was the best thing I’d ever tasted—the snippets of hot fat, the smoky bite of paprika, the juicy, tender meat. It was so good, I had myself a second.
I scanned Dranka’s shelves. She must have had a couple dozen cookbooks, everything from The Joy of Cooking to Julia Child. Curious, I pulled one down called The Taste of Serbia and a photograph fluttered to the floor.
It was a picture of Rex and Dranka in happier times. He sat at a table with his Medal of Freedom draped around his neck. Dranka leaned over him, presenting him with a chocolate birthday cake. Both faces glowed in the light of the flickering candles.
I stuck the photograph back into the book and wedged the book into its rightful place on the shelf. I was considering snitching a third piece of lamb when Dranka came back into the room with an oversized mailing envelope, stuffed to bursting.
“You see for yourself,” she said.
I sat down at the table and shook everything out of the envelope. Dranka returned to her cooking.
She had collected a hodgepodge of stuff, some of it dating way back. There were X-rated letters from his former wife, adoption agency documents, foster care reports, a big bundle of correspondence from the detective office, but the real killer was an exchange between Rex and a Connecticut family court judge.
The judge had written to say that Schoeninger’s ex had proven, in the eyes of the court, to be unfit to raise the child. She’d been drinking, dropped the kid in a bathtub of scalding hot water, and ended up taking him to an emergency room. The judge’s question was, would Rex, as the adoptive father, be willing to come forward and raise the boy.
Dranka hadn’t been lying. There it was in black and white: Rex writing back no, he would not. He had been traveling more and more—he was supposed to spend six months in Japan for Life magazine, and after that he would be on the road promoting his new novel. In his opinion, it would be best to find the boy a stable home somewhere else.
“I know how hard this must sound,” he wrote, “but sometimes it’s necessary to be hard. It’s not as if I’m condemning the child to the slums of Calcutta. As you know, I grew up an orphan and have done moderately well for myself. Some people have no ear for music. Others have no knack for parenthood. I fear I am one of those. I will confess to you, I shudder at the thought that if I took this boy, it would be just another way for that psychotic woman to keep her hooks in me. It is time to bring this sad experiment to a close.”
I put the letter down and pushed it away from me. Dranka moved the meat back to the platter and began to fry the onions and the garlic in the pan. “So what do you think I should do?”
“What are you planning to do with this?” I asked.
“I sell it to Oprah.”
“Jesus Christ, Dranka, you can’t do that.”
“If she not want it, I sell it to Jerry Springer. Let the whole world see what a fake he is.”
Dranka moved the meat back to the platter and began to fry the onions and garlic in the pan. If the woman thought she was getting on Oprah, she was loony. They would throw her out in ten seconds. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that in the right hands, the stuff I’d read was pure gold. I needed it all for myself and I couldn’t afford to let her muck it up.
“No offense, Dranka, but you may be in over your head here. These people will eat you alive.”
“Let them try,” she said.
“Have you ever dealt with these media people before?”
“No.”
“Are you going to get yourself a lawyer, then?”
A shadow fell across the hawklike face. “I not sure.”
“Don’t be a fool. You’re not going to be able to pull this off by yourself. You walk in and all these people are going to see is a pissed-off ex-employee with a green card and a bunch of crazy allegations. There could be a movie deal in this, a seven-figure book contract, who knows? But you’re going to need a pro on your side.”
“Somebody like you?”
“It doesn’t have to be me,” I said. “But right now I’m the only friend you got.”
Her eyes narrowed. “So you looking for a cut of this?”
“Good Lord, you think I’m doing this for the money?”
“Why else you do it? You think Dranka an idiot?”
I sighed and locked my fingers behind my head. I didn’t really want to do it, but it looked as if I didn’t have any choice but to trot out the heavy artillery. “Okay, I’ll level with you,” I said. “Yesterday after you drove off, I went up to the house. I was hoping to talk some sense into the old guy, how as far as I could see the whole thing had been nothing but an unfortunate accident. But he was so hot he wouldn’t listen to anybody. He was talking about going to the cops.”
Her eyebrows arched like caterpillars. “The cops? Why would he go to the cops?”
“Dranka, I’m sorry. Maybe I should have never brought this up.”
“He’s going to have me arrested because I ran over his dog?”
“It’s not just that. He claims you’ve been taking things.”
The wooden spoon went still above the black skillet. I watched the color creep up her neck. “What kind of things?” she said.
“Oh, different stuff,” I said. “Money. He claims he actually saw you going into his wallet when you thought he was taking a nap. Food. Stuff out of the freezer.”
Furious now, she pointed the spoon at my chest. “Food? He’s complaining about food? If I no take it, it rots!”
Famous Writers I Have Known Page 14