by Patti Abbott
“Actually—there is. I was wondering if your father was taking on new clients. We have some legal problems. Well, not problems exactly. Questions. We have some questions.”
“You want my father?” Had he even mentioned Dad to Ralph?
“I—or, that is, we—we heard he was a…a crackerjack attorney. Good for a special sort of….” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, the name sounded familiar and then Matt put it together.” He cleared his throat again. “He’s not retired, is he?”
“You know I’m an attorney myself, Matt.”
“No kidding. Do you have a practice?”
“Well, no, but the majority of attorneys don’t actually have practices—”
“Would he have a problem with my calling him this late? Your father, that is,” Ralph interrupted, adding softly. “We need someone experienced in litigation.” He sighed quietly. “Funny how your closest friends can turn on you. Just because we both got out alive is no reason….”
“No, he’s used to late calls.”
He hung up a minute later and his thoughts returned to Nahla. The missing leg was certainly a lucky break. He tried to picture her as she looked earlier at the airport, but the image of how she must look stuffed into the florist’s cart kept pushing it away.
Denny slunk into an almost, empty theater showing the movie Girls Girls Girls XXX the next day. It was the only spot in town cognizant of the fact that a small but select group of patrons couldn’t watch certain types of DVDs at home. As he made his way down the dark center aisle, he managed to trip over some obstruction in his path, breaking his fall in the last seconds by grabbing a nearby seatback. What the hell? Had the usher left a trashcan? Was it a patron’s wheelchair or oxygen? Someone’s bike or shopping cart? A passed-out moviegoer?
Running his hands up and down the impediment, he discovered it was a hose of some sort. Some kind of mammoth vacuum cleaner perhaps? On his knees, the smells of popcorn, rug cleaner, vomit, and licorice nearly overwhelming him, he followed the hose it to its source—a tank, then a carrier, and finally, Patrick, gawking at the screen. Denny wasn’t sure whether Patrick could see him, but that afternoon both boys pretended the dark was absolute, impenetrable. There was not another soul in the theater so Denny had his choice of seats.
Across the city, as always, Michael Patterson conducted business.
A SAVING GRACE
He could get to work fairly quickly by taking the Interstate. Five turns of the wheel and he was pulling up at the shop. The blacktop was smooth; the state had resurfaced it only last summer and the traffic was light at 7:00 a.m., mostly eighteen-wheelers moving steadily to the west.
But he hated driving the Interstate, miles of jockeying with sixteen-wheelers that passed through the area as quickly as possible; every Mom and Pop cafe catering to the truckers for half a century had failed in the last few years, and even the distraction of billboards had disappeared. He’d driven that road into the city for years when he did detective work and had to travel it. Every time he gave into the Interstate’s promise of a swifter trip now, he was transported back to that time and its gut-wrenching tension.
So instead, he usually drove a circuitous route taking him twice the time, much of it passing through farm country. He liked to watch the lights coming on and then blinking off in the farmhouses, the smoke drifting out of the chimneys, the distant figures moving toward outbuildings or into the fields, the children waiting on jiggling legs for the school bus to take them into town, the occasional braying of animals, the smell of dung, bacon, cheap fuel.
She was standing on the road for the fourth Tuesday in a row. He’d debated offering her a ride the second, then third time he saw her, but she looked away as if sensing his intention and declining. The fourth week, he held her glance and stopped. Said the usual things; she laughed the way his mother’s friends always had, with a hand covering her mouth. A true farm woman’s gesture. Made him feel protective. She climbed into his truck, hugged the door for the twenty-minute ride, and thanked him profusely before scuttling into the library.
He still lived outside Shelterville though his ex-brother-in-law told him he could make triple his salary if he moved to Chicago, Kansas City or maybe even Des Moines. He lost track of Cindy, his ex-wife, a million years ago, but her brother, Buddy, his best friend before and after his brief marriage, still called him on the occasional Sunday.
“Ever crave a Thai dinner,” Buddy asked him only last week. “Or don’t you ever want to bang a girl you didn’t know in grade school? Or, better yet, her daughter.”
“Sure,” Jim agreed. “But I can drive into the city once or twice a month for that stuff. How often do you really want Thai when you got good burgers and pizza here at half the price?”
“Cindy’s pregnant again,” Buddy said softly.
“Third one?” Jim guessed.
“Fourth. Craig’s still chasing after a son.”
Cindy was made for motherhood, but he hadn’t been ready for anything like that ten—no, fifteen—years ago. Wasn’t sure he was now. If men were rated on the simplicity of their needs, he’d be at the top of the list. In descending degree of urgency, he looked for: beer, books, basketball, broads. He didn’t need many friends—hadn’t really made a new one since high school. Hell, he’d hardly met anyone new in the twenty years since he graduated.
He wasn’t attracted to the woman on the roadside, or at least he told himself that. A small degree of revulsion actually flitted through his stomach: a warning perhaps? Each time, she was standing just to the right of the mailbox, perilously close to the edge of the drainage ditch as if this precise spot was agreed on. Her legs were pressed together like standing in an open-legged stance was improper. Or maybe it was just habit or a family thing. Maybe her whole family stood like that, much the way his folks walked on their heels and had earlobes attached to the skull.
Even from the distance in the flat terrain, he could pick out her lavender raincoat and her black patent leather purse, hanging limply from her right arm. She never wore another coat in all the months he knew her and never once went without it. It hit 90 degrees more than once that summer and she must have been sweating heavily beneath the polyester. Even on the warmest days, she wore stockings that made her knees gleam as they pressed together on the seat beside him. Her knees were large for such a slight woman, nearly the size of his. Once, but only once, he mistakenly put his hand on a knee when reaching for the gearshift. She jumped as if he’d struck her, and his hand heated up like an electric stove burner in the moment or two it rested there. A second passed and then she laughed, a muffled, choking sound he was both drawn to and repelled by.
After his daily tour of the countryside, he arrived at the body shop at 7:30 a.m., leaving each day by 4. He was good at the work—work he’d looked for after leaving the police force. And, even more determinedly, after his short-lived attempt at being his own boss as a private investigator in the city. After that stint, which was neither financially rewarding nor psychologically appealing, he realized it was the work itself he couldn’t take, not just the administrative crap, not just the series of sadistic superiors and guffawing peers who couldn’t make the force in any other town on earth.
It was the nature of work itself that ground him down to a shivering nub of the man he’d been. He was not suited for tangling with people in the midst of domestic strife: the bread and butter of the private investigator. He was not made for scrutinizing the detritus of humanity on a daily basis: women cheating on their husbands, employees with their hands in the till or scurrying back to their workplace after hours to siphon some gas out a tank, some paper our of a backroom, some spare parts out of the garage. And, most especially as in his last case, men chasing down teenage boys or girls through the Internet. That one had chewed him up more effectively than the bout of cancer he dealt with last year.
So here he was—a grease monkey at almost forty.
But he had his routine down pat now and felt sane. His trailer re
quired about 20 minute’s maintenance a day and he only turned on his TV to watch sports and the occasional old movie. Most nights, he made himself a quick meal and headed for Taffy’s, the nearest bar that didn’t make him worry about fights and food poisoning. Took his usual stool, where the bar made a turn, and ordered two beers over the next ninety minutes, listening more than he talked, breathing in more smoke than was good for him, sitting too long without exercise.
Everybody liked him well enough, but he wasn’t sought out—not by either sex. Maybe no one quite trusted him with even the most ordinary stories or gossip—he still was a cop to them. Maybe they thought he’d been privately hired to tell their wife about their Friday night destination, or to report to their boss that they carried an awful lot of change in their pockets. All the actual paraphernalia of his years as a dick sat in a storage unit out on the highway, but apparently the essence of it still clung to him like yesterday’s sweat.
“You’ve got those crazy eyes,” one of his scantily dressed escorts told him once. “Always feels like you’re always watching me.” She shivered a little, and he understood what she meant even though he couldn’t change it.
Maybe he just didn’t understand how to be one of the guys. He never played pool at the table in the back, never sank quarters into the juke box. Never picked up a woman at Taffy’s, not wanting to piss where he lived. For that urge, he frequented a second place farther out of town, but only two or three times a month. The only other thing he did was read, but he was a champion at that, reading four or more books a week. That habit, one his mother insisted on in his childhood despite his father’s derision, stuck.
Louise—that was the woman name—was talkative despite her mousy exterior. Her high-pitched voice prattled on about the price of gas, a soccer game her son had played in—yes, she had children, two of them—or the surprising success of the lantana in her garden. He didn’t listen closely to much of what she said, at least the parts about recipes for watermelon pickles and fundraising drives. Instead he watched the pulse beat in her wrist, the throb of it. Steady at times and jumpy at others, it nearly hypnotized him. And he breathed in her scent, a sort of loamy, yeasty smell that had all but disappeared from other country women.
“Do you bake your own bread?” he asked once and she nodded.
“Perry likes fresh bread every morning. I get up before five to have it on the table.”
She didn’t say this proudly but with a kind of resignation. Perry and Louise owned a small farm, but both of them worked in town to make ends meet. On Tuesdays, Perry went to Lynchburg and beyond on deliveries so Louise was without transportation.
“Picks me up on the way back when he can,” she told Jim, looking out the truck window. “Oh my, the Ryan farm is up for sale.”
He leaned past her to look and they sighed simultaneously.
Louise never said what kind of deliveries Perry made and Jim didn’t ask, but her emphasis on the word – deliveries—made him uneasy. Was that idiot selling drugs? He tried to picture this husband of hers—this Perry—but failed. He could check to see if there was a police file on him, but that would send him back into the fray. Asking about Perry would make it seem like he was setting out on his own again. Was he? Was that it?
Likewise, Louise’s son and daughter seemed like characters in fiction until one day when she pulled out their school pictures. Both were slightly stout, square-headed farmer’s children wearing clothing as well-worn as hers. Perhaps it was her clothing, saved from her childhood in the seventies in some attic trunk.
For her contribution to the family income, Louise worked the checkout desk at the library, coming in early to dust, mop and clean the unisex restroom.
“I get the first pick at new books,” she said with a giggle. “Trouble is, I don’t read much.” When she saw a look of disapproval on his face, she amended it. “Well, if I do get a chance to read, I like romances. I buy used paperbacks at the bookshop.”
He nodded, knowingly. The back table at Fred’s Books was a veritable landfill of love stories. He preferred crime fiction, biographies and stories set in Africa or Asia—some place exotic—although he’d traveled so little most places could qualify as that. After he’d been driving Louise to town for a few months, he picked up a romance out of curiosity but couldn’t get beyond the first few pages. The writing was stiff, the characters stock. But mostly he was embarrassed by such sentiment and lust.
It was always on Tuesday then: Louise chattering away and Jim mostly looking at the road ahead. When he had the temerity to look at her face, he sometimes saw the bloom of purple and blue on her chin, her cheek, her eye. She was shockingly inept at covering it up. He would’ve thought it deliberate except for the badly-applied lipstick, the run in her stocking, the hem coming loose. He could smell the soap on her hands, but the nails needed filing.
On occasion, a small scarf around her neck slid up or down to reveal what looked like fingerprints or small cuts. Once she wore a sling for two weeks, and another time, she couldn’t climb into his truck because of the pain in her hip. He jumped out and gave her a hand, feeling that strange heat again when he touched her.
“You’re the clumsy sort, I guess,” he said, thinking maybe she’d confide in him, but hoping even more she wouldn’t. What would he do with such information? Take her home with him? Challenge her husband to a shoot-out? Was he still trying to put a case together?
“That’s what Perry always says,” she said hurriedly, wincing. “Hope the kids don’t inherit it,” she said, looking at him hard.
Later, he would wonder if she meant him to do something about it that day. But Perry was rarely mentioned after that except in terms of having needs and desires she had to meet.
“Perry needs me to go to the bank. Could you drop me there?” Or, “Perry has a prescription needs filling at the drugstore.”
Talk of her children though brought light into her eyes. She talked about Brownies, dentist appointments, soccer, piano lessons and PTA meetings till he knew their schedule as well as she did.
“My parents never let me do any activities,” she explained, emphasizing the word. “So I make sure my kids join all of them.” When he looked at her quizzically, she said, “My mother was always sick and my dad needed me to do her chores after school.”
He wondered if her mother had been beaten too. He knew such patterns existed. Wife-beaters looked for women used to such treatment. Women who didn’t talk—who expected it. That was the profile he saw again and again in his years as a detective. Dully the same.
Despite his revulsion at her treatment and their growing, if odd, friendship, there was something about her that made his fists clench. She wore her wounds like a soldier might, like they’d been earned or were signs of some personal valor. Why couldn’t she cover them better? Or why didn’t she put an end to it all and leave her brute of a husband? If she was so sensitive to the needs of her children, why did she continue to expose them to his savage treatment? He thought about mailing her a brochure on wife-battering he had seen circulating at the police department years ago, but feared her husband—Perry—might find it first. There was nothing to do but go on, continue driving her into town each Tuesday and hoping for the best. Trying not to investigate every aspect of her life as his old training suggested he do.
She brought the little girl with her in October.
“This is Sierra,” Louise said, lifting the little girl onto the seat and climbing in after her. “The school boiler broke down so she has the day off. Perry took Dylan along with him.”
“Hi, Sierra,” he said, helping the child to slide to the middle of the bench. He couldn’t think of anything to say after that and Sierra seemed similarly at a loss.
“Sierra’s gonna help me put the books away today,” Louise explained, smoothing the little girl’s skirt down and adjusting her coat.
He wondered if this was true. Sierra looked too young to know the Dewey Decimal System, too short to restock shelves. It was then
he noticed a yellowish bruise on Sierra’s upper arm and felt the coffee and oatmeal he’d eaten an hour earlier rise in his throat. The child couldn’t be more than six or seven. He jerked the wheel without thinking and all three of them lurched toward his door, Sierra nearly falling on the floor.
“Be careful, Jim,” Louise ordered. “We don’t want any more accidents just now.” She looked pointedly at the child’s arm. “Sierra’s inherited my clumsiness, I guess.”
Jim nodded. “Looks like it’s a family problem.” He realized at once the double meaning of his remark but Louise looked placidly out the window, patting Sierra’s knee every now and then. He had never seen a quieter little girl. When they got out of the truck in front of the library, he realized Sierra had never said a word. Was she afraid of men because of her father?
Two Tuesdays later, Louise wasn’t there. As he approached the spot from the distance, he thought perhaps she had finally put on a new outfit—something less noticeable than lavender—and that was why he didn’t see her. But when he pulled up to the mailbox, she wasn’t there. He stopped the truck, got out, walked around, waited for nearly fifteen minutes, and finally drove off.
On the way home from Taffy’s that night, he drove by her house. It was dark, but no lights were on inside. He drove by the next morning and the next night, but still saw no lights, no movement. Louise had told him more than once that they had cows, chickens, and a few other farm animals so someone must be feeding them—a neighbor, a relative. He drove as close to the house as he dared but saw nothing.
Why did he feel that he couldn’t drive right up to the house and knock on the door? Why couldn’t he pick up the phone and call? She must have told Perry she got a ride from him on Tuesdays. He’d been giving her a ride for six months.
But for some reason, he felt he should keep his distance. Was he afraid of a face-to-face meeting with this mythical Perry who beat his wife and child and probably sold drugs? Was this part of the real reason he’d left the force and detective work? Was he a coward? Was that at the heart of it? Or was he afraid of himself, of his own reaction to this monster?