Liars Anonymous

by Louise Ure

  And those lies got easier to tell every day. Unlike other twelve-step programs, mine didn’t include repentance or atonement. No Thirty Days Honest tokens, no promises to quit.

  I guess the jury hadn’t believed Dresden after all. Or maybe they did, but decided that Walter Racine deserved to die. None of the jurors looked me in the eye after the verdict was read. No secret winks, no chatty farewells. We each turned away, complicit somehow in the lies that still rang through the air—all of us secretly proud killers of Walter Racine.

  The ringing phone brought me out of my wallowed memories.

  “Jessie?” my dad asked. “Are you free for dinner? Your mother would like to see you.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The mailbox at my parents’ house sported a new coat of black paint and the thorny ironwood in the front yard was green with fresh leaves, none of which had dared to fall to the ground. Someone had raked the gravel driveway into concentric waves, like a small rocky tide hitting the shore of the front porch.

  My truck was a shipwreck in the middle of this geometry.

  I scrunched up to the front door, leaving foot-shaped indentations I was sure my mother would rake away the instant I was gone.

  Unwilling to assume that I was still part of the family, I knocked and waited at the closed door. My father’s insistence upon my innocence three years ago had been the reason for my mother’s ultimatum: Choose your adopted daughter or your wife. You can’t have both.

  He chose silence and a continued life with the woman he loved. I’d hated him for it then—I’d hated them all—but I understood it, too. It was my mother’s own personal defense policy: wall it off, separate yourself, and don’t let others touch you.

  “Come in, honey,” my father said, swinging the screen door open toward me.

  I kissed him on the cheek and moved past him into the living room. Nothing seemed to have changed in the almost three years I’d been gone. The long sofa with the curled, dark wood arms still sat at a perfect third-leg-of-the-triangle position to the corner. A short stack of newspapers was precisely aligned next to the leather reading chair. Two days of papers, max. More than two days and it’s not news anymore, my mother used to say.

  Maybe the philodendron had added another foot or so of waxy green leaves, but even that new growth had been pruned and trained into a Doric column of green. I’d had to polish those wide fronds with a dab of mayonnaise every Saturday as a kid. I wondered who did it now.

  The TV was on, with a local news anchor talking about the potential bankruptcies of medical centers in the city because of having to treat illegal immigrants when they fell victim to dehydration, violence, or sunstroke as they crossed the border. The volume seemed a little louder than my parents used to listen to it. The first sign of their aging? Or had my own ears changed? Maybe I had spent too much time alone in small quiet rooms to appreciate it.

  Nothing seemed changed, and yet I was seeing it all through new eyes. Had that dining table really been big enough to hold all nine of us? My usual chair had been on the boys’ side of the table, plunked down between Martin and Lincoln to arbitrate fights during the meal. It had never felt crowded.

  There were only three place settings there tonight, one at each end of the long rectangle and another in an eleven o’clock position to the head of the table. It was two against one, no matter how you looked at it.

  “Jessica.” I turned.

  My mother stood erect as a general, her gray eyes wide but unsympathetic. She held her mouth closed and straight, her arms at her sides. She was wearing a crucifix I hadn’t seen before, thin gold with a red stone at the center. There were a few more crow’s-feet at the edges of her eyes, but the Arizona sun could do that to you. So could steeling yourself against the jibes and blandishments of neighbors and in-laws. So could hardening your heart and sending your adopted daughter away.

  “You’ve changed your hair.” She said it without reaching toward me. No compliment. No opinion. Just a statement of fact, with her arms pinned to her sides like they were stapled there.

  “Yeah, I’ve changed.” She didn’t ask how.

  “It’s not much of a dinner,” she said. “How do you like your eggs?”

  As if I were a stranger, someone she had never cooked eggs for before. Someone whose table manners she hadn’t corrected at every meal for almost twenty years. My heart shattered.

  I guess I’d always known, way down deep where the soul takes root, that she would never forgive me. But I never expected her to forget me.

  I followed her into the kitchen, handed her the carton of eggs and leaned against the refrigerator door as she worked. She cracked one egg—tap, tap, TAP—two soft and one hard, separated the white from the yolk, then poured the white into a ring she’d placed in the hot pan. She waited a moment for the albumen to settle, then added the yolk, dead center in the ring. “If you put the whole egg in at the same time, it can turn out lopsided,” she’d explained when I was a child. I didn’t fry my eggs that way anymore, preferring to let things lie where they chose. Sometimes, like truth, even burying them under a distracting sauce.

  She portioned refried beans and eggs onto three plates, then added a rolled flour tortilla and a small dish of hot, fragrant salsa. A do-it-yourself huevos rancheros kit, served the only way she was capable of doing it, with the food walled off, separate and not touching.

  I carried the loaded plates into the dining room, waiting for my mother to indicate each person’s place. It was the first time I could remember sitting at that table when I hadn’t been the one to place the silverware. “The knife protects the spoon,” she’d taught me early on. “Put its blade to the left. You can never tell when the fork will try an attack.”

  Mother gestured to the seat next to my father—six feet and two-and-three-quarter years away from where she pulled out a chair for herself at the other end.

  My father nattered on during the meal. No news of Bonita yet, he said, although the Peace Corps had sent a message that she’d arrived safely in Bolivia. Martin was studying for the chief’s exam—Hadn’t it been especially hot this year? The water bill was through the roof.

  I nodded and smiled in response, adding nothing about my own life, but waiting for someone to ask nonetheless.

  No one did.

  I guess my mother hadn’t changed her mind after all—still keeping her family safe from killer daughters and off-center eggs.

  My father walked me to the door. “Give her a little time, Jess.”

  Another three years? A lifetime?

  I was flipping through radio stations for something happier than the Dixie Chicks when the first motorcycle cut in front of me. I slammed on the brakes and the steering wheel jigged a little to the right before I could correct it. Another two bikes roared up to my left and then two more behind me. The baby brothers of the Braceros tribe again, with blue bandanas on their heads, and wiry arms draped over the ape-hanger handlebars.

  “Hola, chica!” the one on my left called. He puckered and air-kissed when I looked over. I dropped the transmission into neutral and revved the engine, unnerving the guys in front of me enough that they sped up and gave me a little room.

  I was still in a residential neighborhood. No traffic coming my way and no pedestrians on the street. It was going to take more than a revved engine to get these guys off my tail.

  Grant Road was just ahead. I swung around the corner to the right as the light changed to red, floored the gas, and pulled into the fire station across the street with my brakes squealing.

  “You can’t park there,” a young fireman said, coming out of the public access area on the right side of the building.

  A covey of motorcycles turned in behind me, blocking my exit. I got out of the truck and tugged my T-shirt back into place. Glancing back at the young Latinos, I shrugged—whatcha gonna do?—then turned to the firefighter.

  “Is Martin Gammage on duty tonight?”

  Martin refilled my coffee cup and sat back d
own.

  “Sorry to pull you away from your TV show,” I said.

  “Nothing but reruns. So how did it go at dinner?”

  “Dad told you about my coming over?” Maybe it was a good sign if the family was talking about me again.

  He shook his head. “I drove by on my way to work and saw your truck parked in the driveway.”

  I guess there were still only six kids in the family.

  “It was okay. Mom’s not ready to make any changes, but it was nice seeing her again.” Yeah, Martin, it’s a barrel of laughs to watch your mother unhook you from the only anchor you’ve known for thirty years as easily as if she was untying an apron.

  He must have seen the sadness behind my response. He changed the topic right away.

  “What’s with that gang of motorcycles that followed you in?”

  I explained about the connection between Markson and Felicia, and following that trail to Carlos and the Braceros.

  “We’ve had to deal with some of their victims,” Martin said.

  “What kind of victims?”

  “Illegals they’ve left in the desert. Men they’ve killed in drug deals. There was a crack house off Prince Road that exploded, killing all six people inside, including a baby. Putting that fire out was no cakewalk.”

  “So the cops know about them and don’t do anything?” Just like they’d done with Walter Racine. I’d never believed it when they said he was innocent.

  “They do what they can. I’ve got a friend on the Gang Task Force who says this group is getting more dangerous every day.”

  If their prominence in both Tucson and Nogales was any indication, I agreed with his assessment. I waited until I was sure the motorcycles were gone, then gave my brother a hug good-bye.

  “You going to be around for a while?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” Len Sabin might have something to say about that. And, as much as I might want to get away, I had nowhere else to go.

  I fired up the truck and put it in reverse.

  “Take care of yourself, Jessie.”

  I had to. Nobody else was lining up for the job.

  Bonita’s house would have been too quiet, with too much empty space to fill up with grievances and reflections. I needed noise—an excuse not to talk or think. I headed east, back to the bar where I’d found the cowboy.

  It was quieter on a Monday night, just two tables of drinkers. A loquacious old man with whiskers in his ears held court at the bar.

  “What can I get you?” the bartender asked. He had black hair curling just over his collar and a soft voice to go with it.

  “Something that will take me a million light years away from Tucson.”

  He smiled. “Coming right up.”

  He returned with a martini glass full of something pink and slushy, a drink that in my former bartending life I would only have offered to blondes who ended their names with an i. “Guaranteed to cure what ails you.”

  “Thanks.” I took a sip. Bitter and sweet at the same time. Kind of like dinner with my mother. “It may take more than one of these.”

  He mopped an already clean spot on the bar in front of me. “You were in here the other night, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He glanced both directions to make sure the other drinkers were taken care of, then ran his finger across my lip. “I’ve got another cure for the blues. Can you hang on a half hour until I get off?”

  I could and did.

  He was reaching for my belt buckle before we even made it to the door of the truck. I put the key in the lock, swatting away the hand at my waist. “Let me get this open.”

  “I’ll tell what I want to get open.” He reached into the front of my jeans.

  “Hold on. Let’s get inside first.”

  “Yeah, let me get inside.” He spun me around and plastered me to the cab of the truck like wallpaper. His breath was a combination of mint and sewer.

  Had it come to this? That losing myself to mindless, fetid groping was better than the silence inside my head?

  “You know what? This wasn’t such a good idea.”

  “Uh-uh. No fair going back now.” He unzipped my pants and pushed my jeans and underwear down past my hips.

  I was pinned to the door, and hampered by not being able to kick with my pants down. I gave him a shove that sent him sprawling.

  “I said no.”

  I opened the truck door and reached for the tire iron under the driver’s seat.

  He sprang up, grabbed my left arm, and pulled. “I’ll show you what happens to a cock tease.”

  I didn’t fight the tug, but kept spinning past him. I smashed the metal bar down on his forearm and he dropped to his knees.

  “And I’ll show you what happens to a rapist.”

  I got in the truck and laid rubber taking off.

  Chapter Eighteen

  It was after two a.m. when I finally made it back to Bonita’s house. My nerves were as tight as barbed wire and my hands still shook from the confrontation with the bartender. What the fuck was I doing?

  My dad used to keep a red metal air tank in the garage to inflate the dozens of basketballs and bicycle tires that a family of seven kids required. I’d been surprised that first time I filled it up with air at the gas station. It weighed no more full than empty. Was that what I was doing now? Trying to fill the emptiness in me with something as weightless and insubstantial as air?

  I had already put the truck in Park before I noticed the slice of light coming from the partially open front door.

  No one on the street. No cars or motorcycles that I hadn’t seen before. And no sound from inside.

  Of course, the gun was in the kitchen instead of in my hand. I pulled out the tire iron again. It would give me enough protection until I could get inside.

  Tiptoeing along the side of the house and across the patio, I ducked below the windows and avoided the patches of full moonlight that made the scrubby dry grass look frost rimed.

  The light from inside was brighter now—probably the bedroom lamp or the overhead light in the hallway—but I still couldn’t see anything through the glass pane on the kitchen door.

  I drew a deep breath and stopped to dial 911 on my cell phone, but clipped the phone back on my waistband before pushing the Send button. Slowly, slowly, I turned the key in the lock. A single loud click.

  I opened the door and stepped in, but immediately tripped on a mop that had been left leaning against the table. Down on all fours, I scrambled to the cupboard that held the gun.

  Nothing. The cabinet door was already open, the contents of the cleaning bucket strewn like piñata candies across the kitchen floor.

  Tire iron in hand, I moved swiftly through the rest of the house. Bonita’s boxed belongings had been upended on the floor of the bedroom and the mattress was sliced into puffy ribbons. A bottle of ammonia had been emptied on the bed. In the bathroom, the medicine cabinet had been ripped off its hinges and someone had left a stinking pile of human shit in the middle of the floor.

  The front door itself was undamaged, but the jamb had been pried away from the wall. And that ugly yellow chair had taken its last breath. It lay shattered in a dozen bulky mustard colored pieces like a jigsaw puzzle created by a madman.

  The gun was gone.

  Of course, I knew who had done it. Confident that I wouldn’t be home, the Braceros had made sure that I paid a price for having dodged them.

  I opened the windows in the bedroom, refolded Bonita’s clothes, and put them back in the cardboard boxes, tucking the flaps securely under each other to keep the tops closed.

  I lugged the mattress out to the truck and hefted it into the back, then lovingly placed the splintered remains of the yellow chair, the dining room table, and three shattered chairs on top.

  I could have called the cops, told them about the gang following me, and the theft of the gun, but why give Sabin the satisfaction of knowing he was right? He’d wanted that gun three years ago. I had no
doubt that he’d find some way to use it against me now, even if it didn’t involve Racine’s murder.

  My anger fueled the cleanup. I carried, I cleaned, I cried—not in weakness, but in frustration. I’d made an enemy of this Latino gang, but the good guys who were supposed to be protecting me were just as likely to come after me. Damn. Swiping wildly at the word puta that had been spray-painted across the living room wall had succeeded only in smearing the red letters into a bloodred scrawl. Now it could have been translated as “whooooore.”

  The bathroom took more courage. Covering my nose and mouth with my T-shirt, I shoveled the shit into a plastic garbage bag and tossed it into the front yard. Could’ve used that jug of ammonia right about now.

  I added the bag of shit to the load in the bed of the truck and reversed out of the driveway. I’d be waiting at the dump at dawn when they opened.

  The Braceros were telling me to get out of town. I wasn’t sure what I had done to piss them off. Interrupting their drinking festivities in Nogales? Asking about Felicia and Carlos? Dodging their motorcycle advances last night? Whatever it was, they were warning me off.

  And I’d been telling myself to move on, too. There was no hope of a reconciliation with my family, I had no more business to be done here in Tucson, and Len Sabin was too interested in me for all the wrong reasons.

  But now I was pissed.

  I stopped on the way back from the dump for a big breakfast burrito and was waiting at the Wal-Mart outlet when it opened.

  I was down to a box spring and one dining room chair at Bonita’s house. If I was going to be staying for a while, I’d need a few more creature comforts.

  I prowled the aisles, gathering the bare necessities. Bonita’s furniture had been Downscale Dorm Room. My decorations would be Early Biker Chick. I got a pea-green beanbag chair, a foam pad to replace the sliced mattress, a set of two TV trays for tables, and a bathmat, so that I wouldn’t think about what had been on the tile floor. New cleaning supplies, including ammonia, two gallons of white paint, and new locks for both doors. Within an hour my shopping cart and my credit card were both loaded.