by Lou Berney
The question took him by surprise. “Change?”
“Who they are,” she said. “Their character, I suppose. How they act, what they believe. After years of being one sort of person, can you just decide to become a different sort?”
He mulled. Charlotte had another tickle of suspicion. That behind his smile he was assessing her, picking among various options the answer he thought she wanted to hear.
“Most people don’t change,” he said.
“No,” Charlotte. “I agree.”
“But maybe they can. If they want it badly enough.”
She thought for an instant that he might kiss her then. Instead, though, he gave the dog a final pat.
“Well. I suppose I should get back inside,” he said. “Good night.”
16
The woman, Charlotte, required a bit more effort than Guidry had anticipated—she was a bit tougher to read. But he did the spadework. He made sure that their paths kept crossing, he dropped himself into the middle of her life, he made himself … familiar. That was half the battle right there. And then turn on the charm, turn up the heat. But not too much. He needed her to trust him. When the opportunity arose on a romantic moonlit night—or, rather, when Guidry created the opportunity for himself—he didn’t make a pass at her. Why, the thought never even crossed his mind. He was the perfect gentleman.
He slept fitfully. Every time he started to drift off, a persistent worry tapped him on the shoulder and drew him back. What if he was wrong? What if Seraphine’s men hadn’t been fooled in Goodnight? What if they knew he was on 66, headed west? What if they were closing in on him right this minute, slowly but surely?
Wednesday morning he filled his mug with scotch and a splash of coffee. Picked up the Albuquerque paper in the motel office—caroline visits father’s grave—and told the operator to give him Las Vegas, please, Evergreen 6-1414.
The butler with the English accent answered the phone again. “Mr. Zingel’s residence.”
Guidry hesitated. How about this. Hang up and call Seraphine instead. And tell her what? Let’s forgive and forget, water under the bridge. He knew what she would say. She would tell Guidry, But of course, mon cher. Come home. My arms are open. And then she’d have someone waiting for him to step off the plane. Seraphine was fond of Guidry, he knew, but that and a nickel would get him one song on the jukebox.
“It’s me again, Jeeves,” Guidry said. “I called yesterday.”
“Ah, yes. Mr. Marcello,” Ed’s butler said. “One moment, please.”
Half a second later, Big Ed picked up.
“Listen to me, you backstabbing piece of shit,” Ed said. “You miserable cocksucking wop. So you want me to do a favor for you? I’ll do a favor for all mankind. I’ll stick the barrel of a gun up your wop asshole and pull the trigger. I’ll stick two guns up your asshole and pull both triggers.”
“Hi there, Ed,” Guidry said.
“A favor? For old times’ sake? Is that supposed to be a joke, you fucking—” Ed stopped. Guidry could hear him pacing, breathing through his mouth. “Frank?”
“I figured that message would get your attention,” Guidry said.
“Frank Guidry. Goddamn it.”
Guidry didn’t know why Ed hated Carlos so much. He was just relieved to confirm it.
“How’ve you been, Ed?”
“Goddamn you, boychick,” Ed said. “You almost gave me a heart attack I was so worked up. I ought to stick the barrel of a gun up your ass.”
“I’m just fine,” Guidry said, “thanks for asking.”
Guidry heard Ed tell the butler to get lost. A door clicked shut. Now began the dance. Guidry would lie. Ed would lie. They’d circle and twirl, each of them hoping to catch a flash of bare skin—the truth, or part of it. Watch your step and don’t lose the beat.
“So tell me,” Ed said. “What did you do to get that greasy bastard tied into such a knot? Word is, he won’t stop till you’re dead yesterday. You were his fair-haired boy.”
“I got my hand caught in the cookie jar,” Guidry said.
“Bullshit. All this fuss over a little money? Bullshit. Carlos has everyone and his monkey looking for you. What really happened?”
“Who said the cookie jar was full of money?”
Ed chewed on that for a while and then laughed. “You screwed his daughter?”
“She screwed me. Hand to God, Ed. I just lay there turgid with fear while she did most of the work. I tried to escape, don’t think I didn’t think about it.”
Ed laughed so long and so hard he started to cough. Maybe he didn’t buy Guidry’s story. But it was an amusing one, and with Ed that counted for something.
“I wish I’d seen that bastard’s face when he found out,” Ed said. “Did you knock her up, too? I’ll give you ten grand right now if you knocked her up. I’m getting my checkbook out of the drawer.”
“I didn’t knock her up,” Guidry said. “No. And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t spread such ugly rumors.”
“He can only kill you once,” Ed said.
“It’s the part that comes before the killing that I’m worried about.”
“Where are you?”
“Miami.”
“Bullshit.”
“I need to get out of the country, Ed. Will you lend me a hand or not?”
“I said I would, didn’t I?”
“Did you?” Guidry said. “I must have missed that.”
“I’ll lend you a hand, boychick,” Ed said. “Of course I will.”
“What’ll it cost me?”
“Don’t insult me. It’ll be my pleasure. On the house.”
Not likely. Sure, Ed hated Carlos and he liked Guidry, but that wouldn’t be enough. Guidry would have to pony up, his very last penny.
“I know about a few business ventures the Marcellos are planning,” Guidry said. “The details. Carlos is expanding the empire. A fella in the know could make a killing, Ed.”
“Hmm.”
Hmm. In the language they both spoke, this meant, What else you got? The problem was that Guidry didn’t have anything else to offer. “Ed …”
“Forget all that, boychick,” Ed said. “I’ve got bigger plans for you.”
It didn’t surprise Guidry that Ed had already figured out a price, in the few short minutes that they’d been on the phone together. Or else Ed had started his figuring earlier, when Guidry left the first message for him. He’d known all along that it was Guidry calling, not Carlos. He’d guessed correctly why Guidry was calling.
“I’d love to hear about it, Ed,” Guidry said.
“Indochina,” Ed said.
“Indochina?”
“There’s money pumping into Vegas today, but where’s the money going tomorrow? That’s the question that piques my interest. Now that he’s president, LBJ will want to swing his big Texas dick around. Not Cuba, that’s old news. Vietnam, boychick, that’s the new hot spot. The CIA needs a real war. Hughes does, too. Military contracts don’t grow on trees.”
Until now Guidry had been plotting only a single move ahead. Stay alive. Get out of the country, away from Carlos. Past that, Guidry would worry about the fire once he made it out of the frying pan.
“You want me to work for you?” Guidry said.
“With me,” Ed said. “You’re clever and you’re smooth, and you’d sell your own mother to the Gypsies. I want a man like that representing my interests. That dumb greaseball in New Orleans wasted your talents. You’ll run the show over there. Saigon is a helluva lot of fun, I’ve heard. Right up your alley. You’re going to beat the crowd and get us the best seat in the house. How does that sound?”
It sounded good. It sounded beautiful. It sounded like an Art Pepper saxophone solo or a woman sighing with pleasure. Ed would own him, and Guidry would be in his debt forever, but so what? He was offering to give Guidry his life back. Not the exact one he’d had in New Orleans, maybe, but one a lot like it, even brighter and better.
Sure, it s
ounded good. Or did it sound too good?
“Ed, you’re a prince,” Guidry said. “Thank you.”
“How soon can you get to Vegas?” Ed said. “You’ve got a passport?”
“A couple of days. Friday. I don’t have my passport.”
“All right. That’s not a problem. Call me the minute you get here. I’ll take care of everything.”
Guidry hung up. He remained in the same state of suspended uncertainty he’d been in before the call. Just suspended even higher now, staring down at a drop without a bottom.
Trust Ed. Trust Ed? Guidry confirmed that he still hadn’t a better play. Las Vegas, here I come. Now all he had to do was make it from here to there without getting recognized, without getting killed.
Eight-thirty in the morning. He didn’t want to accidentally cross paths with Charlotte in town, so he walked over to her casita to see if she was there. The blond daughter opened the door.
“Hello there, Joan,” Guidry said.
She gravely weighed her opening remarks. “Hello.”
The curly-haired daughter, Rosemary, pushed in front of her. “Hello, Mr. Wainwright. We’re in New Mexico.”
“Yes we are,” Guidry said. “Every part of us.”
Charlotte appeared behind her daughters, smiling. She noticed the car keys in Guidry’s hand, and the smile, he was pleased to see, faltered. “Oh,” she said. “Are you leaving?”
“Leaving?” he said. “No, not till tomorrow or Friday. I thought I’d take a drive into town and pick up a few necessaries. And bring back a sack of jelly doughnuts, if somebody here promises to help me eat them.”
“Yes!” Rosemary said.
“That’s very thoughtful of you,” Charlotte said.
“Don’t move a muscle, any of you,” Guidry said. “I shall return.”
He drove into Santa Maria. It didn’t take him long, in a town this tiny, to find the garage. The grease monkey was working on a car in the bay, wiring up a new taillight assembly. The same car that Guidry had seen broken down by the side of the highway. The same car he’d seen attached to the tow truck that delivered Charlotte to the Old Mexico Motor Court.
The grease monkey looked over. Guidry watched for his reaction. There wasn’t much of one. Call it mild irritation, surly indifference. Good. He wasn’t on the lookout for any Guidrys.
“Busy,” the grease monkey grunted at him.
“I was hoping to get my Dodge tuned before I hit the highway tomorrow,” Guidry said. “The belts checked, at least.”
“Busy.”
“You don’t say? What’s that you’re working on there?”
Guidry took a ten out of his wallet and set it on a tool bench. That changed the temperature in the room. The grease monkey straightened up and eyed the dough.
“I believe that’s the car I saw on the back of your truck day before yesterday,” Guidry said. “Belongs to a lady and her two daughters?”
“That’s right,” the grease monkey said.
“Looked pretty beat when I saw it. What’s the status?”
“Wasn’t too bad. Be done with it in a few hours.”
Guidry kept his wallet out. “That’s wonderful news,” he said.
17
For lunch Charlotte and the girls had Vienna sausages and crackers. Dessert: the remaining doughnuts Frank had delivered to their door that morning. Afterward they walked into town again. It was another gorgeous day, almost springlike. Charlotte wondered how winter in California would be. Sunshine, warm ocean breezes, emerald landscapes. Back in Woodrow, when December rolled around, the cold sucked the color from the sky, the wind stripped the trees bare.
A note taped to the door of the garage said “Back in 5 min,” so Charlotte told the girls to go play in the park across the street. She used the pay phone on the corner to try Aunt Marguerite’s number again.
“Fifty cents, please,” the operator said.
Charlotte inserted the coins. She began to count the rings, but a woman answered almost immediately.
“Hello?”
“Marguerite?” Charlotte said.
“Speaking. Who is this?”
“Aunt Marguerite, it’s Charlotte.”
“Charlotte.”
“Your niece, Charlotte. From Oklahoma.”
“Yes, of course,” Marguerite said. “I know who you are. Charlotte. This is unexpected.”
Marguerite’s voice had a clipped, metallic ring to it, like a hammer striking the head of a chisel—Charlotte remembered that now. And she remembered now, too, what her mother had said once: that if you needed ice for your drink, you could just chip a piece or two off Marguerite.
“It’s so nice to speak with you, Aunt Marguerite,” Charlotte said, “after such a long time.”
“Yes.”
And then silence. Charlotte had hoped to ease into the conversation, to sidle up to the main point and wring every last penny’s worth from her fifty cents. No such luck, apparently.
“Aunt Marguerite, I’m calling because the girls and I might be coming to California soon. My daughters and I, to Los Angeles. And I thought, if it’s not too much of an imposition, I thought we might pay you a visit.”
“Stay with me, you mean?” Marguerite said.
“If it’s not too much of an imposition,” Charlotte said.
“It’s not a good idea. My house is small, and I work at home, you understand. I can’t have noisy children all about and underfoot.”
Charlotte had prepared for the possibility that Marguerite might say no, but the swiftness of it, the decisiveness of the ruling—like the limb of a tree snapped cleanly in half—took her by surprise.
“Hello?” Marguerite said. “Are you still there?”
“Yes, I’m sorry,” Charlotte said. “I understand, of course.”
“I can recommend a good hotel. How long will you be in Los Angeles?”
“How long? Actually, I … My husband and I, Dooley, we’re … We might be getting a divorce.”
“A divorce. I see.”
“And I thought … California. I’ve always wanted to live there. What I want, what I think the girls and I need, is a fresh start, a blank page. I know that must sound silly.”
Marguerite did not rush to disagree. Instead she sighed. “Los Angeles is a difficult city,” she said. “It’s not remotely what people imagine, all golden beaches and orange groves and movie studios.”
“No, of course not.” Though that was, when Charlotte stopped to consider, not very far from what she had imagined.
“Well then,” Marguerite said. “As I’ve explained, I can recommend a good hotel when you’re ready. Though if you want my advice, I’d encourage you to arrange for an apartment before you arrive. Hotels here can be quite expensive.”
It took Charlotte a moment to realize that the conversation—another limb of a tree snapped cleanly in half—had ended.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Good luck, Charlotte,” Marguerite said.
Charlotte replaced the receiver. Staying with Aunt Marguerite had always been an uncertain prospect, she reminded herself. She’d recognized that from the beginning. So. Well. There were other possibilities, if she decided to continue on to California. There would be other possibilities.
She returned to the garage and rang the bell. She rang it again. Finally the mechanic emerged, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. Tobacco juice seeping from the corner of his mouth.
“Hello,” Charlotte said. “I’m here about my car.”
“Yep,” he said.
“Will you be able to have it repaired today? How much will it cost?”
He shifted the lump of tobacco from one cheek to the other. He wouldn’t look her in the eye. She prepared herself for the bad news. Fifty dollars? Seventy-five? Surely not a hundred.
“Front axle’s broke plumb in two, the subframe all beat to hell,” the mechanic said. “Worse’n that, the transmission got beat to hell, too. You must have hit that ditch like a bomb. It’s
a goner.”
“The transmission is a goner?” Charlotte said.
“Car is. Car’s a goner.” The mechanic shifted the lump of tobacco to the opposite cheek. “Fixing it’d cost you more than what the whole car’s worth. I won’t lie to you.”
Charlotte felt her fingertips tingle. A flush of heat spread across her collarbone, and the mix of smells in the cramped little office—tobacco and grease and sweat, the mechanic’s sweat and her own—made her dizzy.
“Do you … Can I sit for a moment?” she said.
He moved a stack of parts catalogs and girlie magazines off a folding chair. He brought her a paper cup full of water and found a book of matches so that she could light her cigarette.
He still refused to look her in the eye. “Sorry, ma’am,” he said.
When Charlotte stepped back outside, the girls were trying to coax the dog onto the teeter-totter across the street. She stood and watched them. She felt numb, brittle, the hollow husk of a cicada crunched beneath a shoe.
She rummaged in her purse for another cigarette. A teardrop rolled off her chin and smeared the ink on the cover of her address book. She hadn’t realized that she was crying. She didn’t know when she’d started.
How stupid she’d been, to think that she might actually have the nerve to see this through, that she might actually leave Oklahoma for good and leave Dooley for good and start fresh on her own. Nerve, after all, was not her strong suit. Her talent was for surrender. When Mr. Hotchkiss refused to let her take photos for the newspaper, she gave up. When Dooley refused to concede that he had a drinking problem, she gave in. When the service-station attendant back in Texas leered at her, she’d stared down at her hands and said, “Thank you.”
She remembered the story about the three pigs that the girls had loved when they were younger. In the story of her life, Charlotte wasn’t brick and she wasn’t even sticks—she was made of straw, the house that the wolf needed but a single good breath to blow down.
Dooley knew her better than she knew herself, didn’t he? So just come on home, Charlie, he’d said at the end of their conversation on Monday. You know you will.
She watched the girls. Would Rosemary and Joan remember any of this years from now? How would they remember it? How would they remember her?