by Maddy Wells
“And that would make you what?” I asked.
He ran the towel between his buttocks, like a pipe cleaner. “It doesn’t matter what the hell I am. We’re getting Alex back. The wheels are in motion. There’s no turning back.”
Chapter Eight
The cousins from Florida packed up their tent, Captain Gerber helping by banging each pole with a stick before his father packed it away, everyone waving as their van pulled away and made the left turn south, towards home.
The rest of us jammed our belongings back in our bus, but it was like putting the stuffing back in a baseball. It was springy and mushy and I didn’t see how all this junk, as well as ourselves, was going to fit. I stayed outside rather than confront the bigger mess we had left inside. Besides the stripped bathroom, we had broken the doors on the liquor cabinet to get at the booze, and had thrown a pound of half-cooked spaghetti on the wall to see if it was finished cooking as someone had seen Jack Lemmon do in a movie. Those were the obvious crimes. If we had looked closely we would have noticed other things, like wine stains on the Oriental carpets and salad dressing on the sofa, but we didn’t fine-tune the inspection that much. The guys tried to tidy up, but they didn’t have the radar for details and so after spending a good amount of time staring at our mess, if not actually doing anything about it, we squeezed into the bus and drove back home.
Susan had caught a train to the city early that morning, so she couldn’t supervise the clean-up crew and give her seal of approval. More importantly to me, I didn’t see her to discuss the details of our plan about Rick. I figured she would just forget it, and part of me, at least, was relieved. It was all right to talk about involving the law in our lives, but to actually invite the law in seemed traitorous and risky, considering the volume of illegal chemicals that fueled our lives.
Shel had seen Woodstock on the news that weekend and was proud that I was part of such a wholesome, youthful happening.
“Just having fun, right?” he asked me, putting an arm around my shoulder the minute I walked in the button store. “Just kids having fun. Did you have fun?”
He beamed at me, checking for fresh bruises and, finding none, widened his smile. “The fresh air, the friends. It’s nice for you, I think. What you need.” Happy that I done something positive for myself, Shel showed me what he had done for me: he had rearranged the store so that the exotic buttons were in the back, the bric-a-brac was moved towards the front with a whole new section devoted to craft supplies. He had even made a small concession to the craze (as he put it) for zippers, allowing Talon to put up a small rotating stand with seven and nine inch zippers in beige, white and black.
“It’s time to change, I think,” Shel said, putting his hands on his belly, rubbing it enthusiastically. “Why was I hanging on to an old way of thinking? I saw the Woodstock on the television and I think, young people are the future. If they don’t want buttons, why should I try to sell them buttons? Sell the young people what they want!” He went on talking like this for a few minutes, swirling the zipper rack then stopping it suddenly like a kid with a whirligig, giving me instructions on the new inventory, how best to pitch it to customers, before he wandered away behind the plastic curtain to his office.
Shel had made other improvements over the weekend, too. A new coffeepot, white with a timed wake-up and grind function had replaced the old. I poured a little into my cup and sipped, rolling the warm brew around my tongue waiting for a taste that didn’t come, it was so weak.
Business was slow. It was August and any New Yorker who had the means had left the city for either beach or mountains. Someplace cool. I told this to Shel, but it didn’t stop his fretting. He had made quite an investment in the new stock and wanted to see it pay off immediately. No, he hadn’t taken out a loan or anything like that, he said. He just had an accountant’s desire to see numbers march smartly from the debit column to the credit side of the ledger. That was nothing I could relate to, so I sat on a stool in the middle of the craft section, reading the paper and periodically taking a piece of red felt off the shelf to wipe the perspiration from my neck and face. The place was boiling. I left early to relieve some of the financial strain on Shel and walked to see Alexandria and Rick.
The last time I had seen them I had said I was working on getting fake papers for Rick, to get him out of the country. So I was surprised to be treated like a celebrity when I arrived. Alex opened the door, clasping me in an embrace. Rick was right behind her, trying to wiggle into the hug.
“He was here today,” Alex said. “The man took down all sorts of information about Rick and said he would take care of everything. I told you, didn’t I?” Alex looked at Rick, triumphantly. He’d obviously doubted my ability to come through on a promise. I felt miffed that he would underestimate me then contrite when I remembered I had actually done nothing at all and Rick’s assessment, rather than Alex’s, was the more accurate.
“What man?” I asked.
“He was a lawyer. He’s going to help Rick. Give him some papers that say he’s exempt from military service. I told you,” Alex said to Rick.
They were set up for a party. Paper plates and cups were on the table. Big jugs of wine and chips.
“More food’s coming later,” Alex said. “We were going to call you.”
I opened a bag of chips and began nibbling nervously. “Do you know when?” I asked.
Alex was rummaging in the refrigerator and looked back at me. “I was going to call you as soon as I thought you would be home from work.”
“No, I mean, do you know when they are going to have the papers for Rick?”
The man hadn’t said, but their opinion was it was imminent. I left, telling them to call as soon as it was party time. Alex took my hand, “Nadia, I don’t know what we would have done without you. It seemed so hopeless.”
“Nothing’s ever hopeless,” I said, wresting my hand away.
The Guru was back on duty in the hallway. He laughed when he saw me, in a comfortable way, not his usual mockery, and didn’t deter me as he usually did, with either his strength or wit. I stepped lightly over him and the olive pits he was spitting on the stairs.
Lance was developing pictures from the weekend, he said. I hadn’t been aware that he was even taking them. When he went out later that evening, I opened the darkroom to look through them. They were lewd pictures of Susan. It must have been after their bout in the bedroom. I wondered if Susan had been aware that he was taking them, she was so drugged. It didn’t seem sporting. I snatched up the prints, about to destroy them, when I thought to look for the negatives. They weren’t there. They weren’t anywhere. I remembered the locked briefcase I had rummaged through the first week I was alone in the apartment. I found it in the bottom of his supply cabinet, exactly where it was before. It was still locked, but it was only a briefcase, the easiest locks in the world to pick, and soon I was in, shuffling through images of strangers in intimate, if slightly unnatural, poses.
Then, at the bottom of the pile, images of a woman who looked a lot more familiar: Alex. I found it hard to both see and breathe, the pounding blood flooded my chest and head. When I could focus again, I shook the briefcase upside down, looking for negatives. They weren’t there. I upset the entire darkroom looking for negatives. He obviously didn’t keep them there. The only negatives I found were those in innocent poses, girls mugging for fashion spreads, labeled politely with the date of the shoot and the girl’s name.
The phone call from Alex came at ten.
“They got him first,” she sobbed into the phone.
I could barely understand her, and I willed myself to act normally, pretending that that I didn’t know that the lawyer who’d interviewed Rick worked for Susan’s father. “Alex, slow down, honey. What’s the matter?”
“The FBI got to him. He’s on a bus right now to South Carolina.”
“Already?” I marveled at how quickly the law acted. “For what?”
“They said if he went right
away and quietly, they wouldn’t press charges. He’s going to basic training, then to infantry training and from there...” She couldn’t go on.
“Don’t move, Alex. I’ll be right over.”
“Don’t! I’m leaving now, too. I’m going to take a bus down there tonight.”
“You can’t do that.” I said, not really knowing why she couldn’t do it. It’s not like he’s in danger.”
“He didn’t raise his hand or anything. He’s not sworn in.” She started crying again. “If he’s not sworn in, it’s not too late to bring him back.”
Didn’t she know that it was irrelevant if he had sworn in or not? If he didn’t get sworn into the army tonight, he was going to be swearing in front of a judge tomorrow. I felt annoyed that Alex would be so stupid in a crisis.
“Don’t you have a shoot tomorrow?” I asked. “Maybe you should wait a few days.”
There was silence on the other end. A big inhale, then, “I gotta run. There’s a bus at midnight to Washington, then I can transfer to Columbia.”
“Don’t! Wait!” I yelled into the phone. “I’ll be right over.”
She clicked off and I slammed out of the loft, not bothering to close the door after myself. I ran the ten blocks to her apartment, tripping over cracks in the busted up sidewalks, once losing my bearings in the dark and going down the wrong street. By the time I got there, she was already gone. She hadn’t locked her door either and I went into the kitchen, viewing the sad remains of their non-celebration. The unused cups and plates, the unopened bottles of wine. The real food, several trays of lasagna, were burning in the oven. I turned the oven off and ran out to the subway to get to Port Authority.
The individual bus portals of the bus station, row after row on either side of a long fluorescently lit corridor, all looked identical. I ran up to a bus driver who was collecting tickets to Harrisburg and asked him where I could get a bus to Washington. “Gate 83,” he said, and as I ran down the corridor I finally saw her alone, sitting on a bench. Her nose was red and she clutched a little purse. She looked small and pathetic and I felt sorry for her, which was a new emotion. She reached in her purse and pulled out two tickets, handing one to me. She’d been expecting me, of course. In her eyes, the old rules still applied. We took our place at the end of the line and got on, sitting in the last available seats, in the back, next to the bathroom.
The ride was bumpy and neither of us slept. Alex spent a good part of the trip in the bathroom throwing up. “Motion sickness,” she said, wiping her mouth on her sleeve, her sour breath almost making me sick. Neither of us had brought a toothbrush or a comb. Nothing. We arrived in Washington at three o’clock and Alex bought a powdered jelly donut at some dirty concession stand, where the sweets were set on top of yesterday’s Washington Posts, before we joined another line of nocturnal commuters headed for Columbia, South Carolina. They were mostly long-haired boys, with the same destination as us: the reception station at Fort Jackson.
“Are you sure this thing isn’t going to make you heave?” I took a bite of her donut, ravenous. “Don’t you have to watch that?” I pointed to her stomach.
Alex said she didn’t give a damn anymore. She wasn’t going to model anymore, she was just going to follow Rick around. That was enough of a life for her. Following Rick. She stuffed the remainder of the stale pastry into her mouth.
“You mean, be a military wife?” I asked, incredulous. “Because that’s what in store for you here. Unless he deserts, in which case you become the wife of a convict and you can visit him in prison.”
“I love him,” she said. “Why is that so hard to believe? People want to be with people they love.”
We took our seats by the bathroom again, and it was a good thing, because Alex occupied it the whole time puking donut. I looked closely at her face. It had seemed fuller, which I’d attributed to tiredness and emotion, but now I understood and I panicked. My one avenue of escape was being blocked. Her jackknifed tractor-trailer was going to block the off-ramp. Alex was pregnant.
Chapter Nine
The sun was up and the air boiling by the time we arrived in Fort Jackson. A black drill sergeant greeted everyone who got off the bus, checking names off a roster. The boys stood in a loose configuration, their bell-bottom jeans and brightly colored shirts incongruous in the khaki colored camp. The drill sergeant bullied them to straighten up, tuck it in, tantalizing them with appointments he had made for them at the beauty parlor. One skinny boy, quite a wag on the bus, was on the ground doing pushups to—as the drill sergeant said—teach his tongue a lesson.
The drill sergeant approached us with evil glee, but became polite when he found out we weren’t signed up for the army, that we just wanted to visit somebody.
“Reception over there, Ma’m,” he said to Alex, touching the brim of his campaign hat. Nodding to me.
We walked over to the tin house that was the reception station. Rick’s platoon was pulling supplies so we waited for him in the office, flipping through magazines. Lunch time came, and Rick’s platoon was in the mess hall, so we went to a bar outside the post, The Outer Limits, to wait until four o’clock, when they said we could see him.
The most Alex could be pregnant was one month. “That’s still enough time,” I told her over a glass of Mad Dog 20/20 at the bar. “That’s still early enough.”
“I’m keeping it, Nadia,” Alex said.
“What are you going to do with a baby?” I asked, trying to hide my desperation. “You can’t take it with you on jobs. Anyway, it’ll ruin your figure and you won’t even get any jobs.”
“I can’t just…get rid of it.” She shuddered.
“It’s not even a baby yet,” I said. “You won’t be getting rid of anything. We’re just starting out. A baby would end your life.”
“I guess that’s what my mother thought, too,” she said. “I was ending her life.”
I was stunned that Alex would have a thought that I wasn’t privy to. We never talked about how lucky we were that her mother hadn’t had an abortion. “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard of,” I said, turning sharply from her, pretending that what she decided wouldn’t affect me at all.
When we first came in, I’d noticed two Negro men in the corner booth, their eyes watery and unfocused by drink. Now one was beside me, his warm, whiskey breath crowding mine. He pulled out a ten dollar bill and waved it around until the bartender plunked down two more jelly glasses filled with MD 20/20 in front of us and two shots of whisky in front of him.
I raised my glass to him in thanks, waiting for him to crane his neck around to see Alex, but he held my gaze in his own dreamy brown one.
“I saw you watching me,” he said.
“Did you?” I hadn’t given him a thought before he appeared waving his money. He was wearing a polyester cream-colored shirt and white linen slacks; brown, Italian-cut shoes. His socks were sheer cream with ribs. He seemed unnaturally dressed up and well-groomed, like someone from a formal southern country. Most of the boys I knew, except for Lance who was so old he didn’t count, belonged to the grungy jean and long hair race. I found him enticingly exotic. I swayed towards his warmth like a sapling seeking the sun through the forest ceiling.
“Jeremy,” he said. Or maybe he said, “Jimmy.” I couldn’t understand him too well beneath his drawl.
The bartender lingered, wiping the counter raw in front of us, until I gave him a dirty look and he walked to the other end of the bar. Jeremy smiled and I felt myself go limp in a way I had previously experienced only by reading novels. Jesus, no, I thought. Don’t let me go all gooney on a colored boy.
At the pool table a few yards from the bar, balls were cracking as a young WAC hustled a couple of recruits. I turned on my barstool to get a look at the girl. She was petite, mocha-colored, with a cast on her right leg almost up to her hip. Her Afro was tipped in platinum, springing out from both ends of her barracks’s cap. She chalked the stick and kept up a constant wave of trash talk to the
two boys, pink and prickly as plucked chickens, who were pulling crumpled bills from their pockets and putting them on the edge of the pool table. When I caught her eye, she winked before bending over to methodically sink ball after ball and collect the pile of dough. The pink boys realized now they never had a chance, but were obliged to rack ‘em up again.
“I couldn’t help noticing how pretty you are,” Jeremy said. “You’re even prettier up close.” He smiled, showing off his dazzling teeth and I waited for him to laugh, but he wasn’t interested in the certified goddess on my right.
“I never claimed to be as smart as you,” Alex said, oblivious to the conversation between Jeremy and me. “But I know what I want. I want a family.”
‘You have a family!” I said, reluctantly ripping my attention away from Jeremy. “What are you talking about? You have me!”
“I want my own family.”
“Come on, Alex, be smart. In a few years you can have everything. A baby if you want. You’ve got to have a life first.” I grabbed her wrist. “That’s why we came to New York! To live. If we’re smart we can have it all.”
“Where did being smart ever get you? Work in a button store!”
“I’m an actress,” I said, lifting my chin. I turned to smile at Jeremy in case he was listening, so he would realize that I wasn’t just some white trash chick who hung around army bases picking up boys. I was an actress.
“That’s right. I keep forgetting because you never act in anything. You know, Nadia, sometimes I think that you don’t even see me for who I am. Just who you want me to be.”
Jeremy wrote a number on a napkin and slipped it into my hand with a smile. His hand was so warm. Then he and his friend left.
We had nothing else to do, so Alex and I drank up a fifth of Mad Dog, lurched off the barstools, and wandered back to post, tipsy. There was no sidewalk, and she seemed unnaturally unsteady, so I guided her by the elbow. The guard at the gate tried to give us a hard time about getting back in, but he only wanted to talk to Alex. I sighed. Even with no sleep, pregnant and vomit dribbling down her blouse, she was a man magnet.