“I met my wife here in Texas.” Howard spoke as if he were reading from notes. “She’s Mexican—she was here on a trip. So was I. We were married, we had a son and we lived in Dallas for a while, then later in New York. During that time I was making investments—big investments in Mexico City. Since we can’t own property in Mexico—Yankees, I mean—it’s a very mixed-up law—I put it all in my wife’s name. There are a hundred better ways of doing it, but not when you’re in love and you think your marriage is going to last forever.” His smile was without pleasure. “Well, the marriage contract didn’t last, but every other contract did. Real estate, a mining company, everything.” He paused, looked away, then his voice became studiedly amiable. “I’d like to reopen negotiations with her.”
“Why don’t you?”
“I’ve got nothing she wants,” he said, with charming candor. “But if I were to take Rafo away from her, she’d break her hump getting back to the bargaining table.”
“You’ve tried without him, of course.”
“I’ve spent over two hundred thousand dollars in lawyers’ fees,” Polk said. He was putting the question to him now. “If I had Rafo, it would cost me a lot less.”
“How much?”
“Would you do it for fifty thousand dollars?”
“No.”
Howard studied him. “How much?”
“I’m not a kidnapper.”
Although Polk had been the first to use the term, he now seemed aggrieved by it. “Don’t use that word—he’s my son.”
“He’s not mine.”
“This is not a crime, Michael.” With quiet reasonableness.
It was too outlandish, Mike thought. “Why me?” he said. “If you think I could do a thing like that—!”
Howard misconstrued “could.” “Oh, but you can,” he said easily. “It doesn’t take any special skill—not the way I’ve got it worked out.” Then, with excessive affability, “If anything, you’re overqualified. Now, if you’ve got any other reservation—”
“Yes, I have.”
“You hate my guts.”
“It’s worth mentioning.”
Howard’s smile was expansive. “Let’s not get bogged down in details, you’ve worked for me before.” Then, with a touch of mischief, “Besides, anybody who’d say he was fond of me, you think I’d trust him?”
It was getting more and more bizarre: Polk had chosen him because Mike’s honesty qualified him to do a dishonest job.
Howard seemed to sense that Mike was getting angry. He continued quickly. “There’s nothing wrong with this, Michael. I’m not even sure it’s illegal.”
Mike erupted. “What the hell are you telling me?—that I’d only be escorting a son back to his loving father?—as innocent as that? What would happen if I got caught by the Mexican police? You’d brush me off like flies!”
“Well,” Howard said, “I would have to keep my hands clean. Certainly until the boy got here.”
“He won’t get here—not with me! Good night, Polk.”
Howard didn’t leave. Abruptly Mike was amazed at himself. What had he been doing, discussing this thing? Why hadn’t he simply said no, without equivocation, without argument?
“Get out,” Mike said.
“Not yet, Michael,” he replied calmingly. “It’s really a great deal easier than you think. I’ve just—”
“No!”
“Will you please listen? I’ve just bought a panel truck, a nice little truck. You’ll be driving it down there on vacation.”
Mike said quietly, “First I’m going to hit you, then I’m going to kick you down the stairs.”
“You stupid son of a bitch! You know what’s going to happen to you? You’re going to wind up on the skids. Just like the other rodeo bucks—drink a little, whore a little—and you’re down the chute. You were partway down once, remember? You’ll go all the way down this time because you’ve got nothing to grab on to. No money. This is a stake, Michael. In all the years you’ve been on a horse, you haven’t been able to scratch together this kind of money. Nothing to see you over a rough time. And here it is—fifty thousand! It’ll give you some time to turn around—get into your own business—find a new place for yourself. Give yourself a chance!”
Not a muscle of Mike’s face moved. The man departed. Mike remained very still.
He heard Howard’s footsteps going down the staircase. Even though he knew the sound of the footfalls was receding, he had a perverse sense that if he didn’t shut the door, they’d come closer again. He shut the door,
He must busy himself. The apartment needed cleaning. He started to clean it. Then he stopped. The apartment didn’t need cleaning at all.
He must do something. For somebody. That was the secret; it was often the secret with him: to do something for somebody. It took him out of himself, it gave him, sympathetically, other people’s feelings. It made him feel generous, made him feel worthy, that he had a right to ask something of life. If only he had somebody to do something for.
Cissy.
That’s who the woman in the bar reminded him of—Cissy Brewer. Not the present-day Cissy, but the girl a few years back, with the naturally golden hair and the naturally high breasts that would never droop because Cissy was going to stay eternally young. He should have realized it was Cissy she recalled; even the place was right, the Red Rio Bar.
His spirits started to lift. He’d go and see Cissy, she was the ideal person to do something for. He’d take her a few things, spend an hour with her. She’d like that.
He got out of the apartment as fast as he could, drove into town to the only supermarket that was open. He bought as much as he was able to carry—eggs, bread, butter, a gallon of milk, fruit and vegetables, a whole smoked ham and the peanut brittle that Cissy loved. He was elated now, to find such a simple solution to a complex misery, and in his mind he thanked Cissy for having come to his rescue. Once before she had come to his rescue, entirely unaware that she was helping him. It was Cissy who had made him terminate that terrible lost year, the time that had started immediately after the death of Laurie.
The year began with grief, then drunkenness. He was not a drinker, never had been. He didn’t especially like alcohol and agreed with one of his bosses, the oldest Macmillan brother, that “licker don’t go with horse sweat.” Particularly, he never drank before a competition. The first time he did—two days after Laurie’s funeral, the night before the Cattlemen’s show—was the first time in five years that he won nothing, not even an exhibition prize. Instead, he got a cracked collarbone. For two months he couldn’t ride and, having nothing to do with himself but gaze at a phantom, he started to gamble. It became regular: twice a week at a poker table in a boardinghouse off the Houston freeway, and every Saturday night at the upstairs blackjack table over Ro Duncan’s Sport Goods Shop. The poker sessions had a semblance of game playing, the black-jack was blatantly for killing. If bourbon-and-riding was a bad combination, bourbon-and-gambling was a catastrophe. Mike was winning and winning and one Saturday night he realized he owed Ro Duncan sixty-one thousand dollars.
He quit gambling and began, by installments, to pay the man off. But he didn’t quit drinking. He’d finish a show and go right from the stadium to the Red Rio Bar. To shoot some darts, he would tell himself, as if he believed the delusion. But it was getting easier and easier for him to trust his self-deceptions.
About two weeks after Donna went to Nevada for the divorce, Cissy had appeared at the Red Rio Bar. She simply materialized one night. Nobody saw her come in, nobody knew where she came from. Blonde and smiling and young, with a sweet foolishness and a rattleheaded sense of humor that was all idiot charm. If she was a hooker she didn’t act that way. She took the time with men, as she self-respectfully put it, gettin’ to know them a little. And she wouldn’t go to bed with just anybody, even at a premium. Mike liked Cis
sy, she gave him good feelings, and Cissy adored him.
But she wasn’t mixed up about anything. “I’ll charge you,” she said to him before the first time. “I like you and I might get to love you, but I’ll always charge you. None of that crap about I love you so much, it’s on the house. Screwin’ costs.”
Some of the men liked her, some didn’t want her around. It wasn’t her choosiness alone that made the rejected ones unfriendly to her. It was bad enough that she didn’t let them into her bedroom; she made it worse by not letting them into her past.
Cissy was a mystery. Nobody knew a thing about the girl. She said, once, that she had come from Amarillo; another time, from Memphis. She claimed never to have been married—and to have been married twice. She spoke about having two little daughters somewhere—she even described them, twins with long blonde curly hair. Then one day she said wistfully that the good-Lord-in-heaven had seen fit to make her “childless and seedless.”
Mike was as mystified by her as everybody else was. Although she hated the other men’s curiosity, she didn’t mind Mike’s. Even when he was drunk, she was goodnatured about answering his questions. But everything she told him added up to evasion, contradiction, dust in the eyes. Then, one night, with the clairvoyance that liquor sometimes brings, Mike saw the truth of the girl’s past.
She herself didn’t know.
It wasn’t that she was elusive with him; it was that her life was elusive with her—she couldn’t remember it.
“Where’ve you been, Cissy?” he asked gently.
He said the question so directly that the girl paled a little. When she tried to move away he held her there and repeated the question. “Where, Cissy?”
She had only one little evasion left. “Away,” she said.
Then he knew—it wasn’t such a wild guess—she had been, somehow, unbalanced, and had spent a part of her life in a sanitarium. He didn’t know how to put the next question tactfully, so he said it as vaguely as he could.
“Somewhere—inside?” he asked.
“Oh, not in a jail,” she said quickly.
“Weren’t feeling well, huh?”
She nodded, grateful for the way he put it. “No, not good.”
He wanted to ask her why, how, what her terrors had been, but he didn’t want to harry the girl. “How’d you get out?”
“No thanks to them,” she said with a mischievous smile. “No matter what they tried—no damn good. Christ, I had so many different kinds of water baths—with hoses and without—in me and outside me—Christ! And shots. And talkin’. Christ, I got so sick of talkin’! Christ!”
“Then how’d you make it?”
She paused. Then she spoke quietly but with the deepest pride. “By myself. I did it by myself.” She lifted her head and her voice softened to an almost inaudible whisper. “I made myself get well. I said to myself, ‘Get well, Cissy—you’re as good as all of them. You ain’t got no medicines and you got no water hoses—all you got is yourself, so you better make do with it—and get well.’ And by Christ, I did it!”
She had indeed done it. She had made do without the past. Sometimes he envied how simply, how cheerfully she got along without a history.
The one thing she didn’t handle too well was rancor. She didn’t handle it at all, barely knew it existed. She had no idea, for example, that the youngest of the Macmillan brothers, Ewell, was out to get her because she had laughed at him and turned him down. Even a more sophisticated person than Cissy mightn’t have recognized Ewell’s hostility. Mike didn’t. If he had, he would never have gotten into the car with them.
Ewell and two friends showed up at the Red Rio one night with a half dozen bottles of sour mash—a new brand and special, they said—and an invitation to “mix with the mash.”
It was one of those wide-open-air nights in summer. So Mike, Ewell, the latter’s two friends and Cissy piled into Ewell’s cream-colored Pontiac and they roared out to the countryside, howling with laughter.
Ewell’s foot was as far down on the floor as the accelerator would go. “Let’s get to nowhere!” he screamed and the others screamed too; it was screamingly funny. “How long’ll it take us?” from another wit, and that was funnier still.
Mike couldn’t remember how they wound up at the stadium. It must have been well after midnight that they found themselves, hobbling drunk, stumbling across the moonlit paddock and into the stable. The horses snorted and snuffled around them, rearing in their stalls, frightened by the nighttime incursion.
“Not him!” Ewell shouted as one of his friends went into the wrong stall. “We want Big Marco!”
Big Marco was an enormous stallion, a couple of hands taller than the average rodeo horse, and wild, and angry, unbroken animal. They found him now, in the stable annex away from the others, the huge black stud, sullen at being disturbed. But very still, menacingly still.
Ewell and his friends seemed to know what they were going to do. One of the boys had a tire iron in his hand. He stepped up onto an overturned feed barrel and, with the metal bar, reached in to poke at the horse. The tire iron got no further than the stud’s haunch.
“It’s not long enough,” Ewell shouted. “I told you it wouldn’t be long enough.”
The other friend found a push broom near the doorway. He broke the handle from the broomhead and came back gleefully. “Hey, look! Use this—use this!”
Ewell snatched it from his hands, shoved the boy with the tire iron off the feed barrel and got up on it himself. He reached the broom handle down toward the horse. He fumbled at first, jabbing at the haunch, the gaskin, the belly. Then, with the end of the stick, he touched what he wanted to touch, the penis.
“Come on, cock, come on!” he said.
The horse blew air through his nostrils, pulled his lips back and reared.
They could scarcely see the penis at first. Then they saw it, not yet large. The horse was angry now, he kicked at the boarding, charged at it. The penis was larger now.
“Look at it,” Ewell yelled. “Hey, Burt—Lem—look at it!”
Burt and Lem shouted as loud as Ewell.
Mike was drunker than the others; he didn’t know what emotion was called for.
Cissy didn’t look. She sensed a horror, but didn’t dare to look for fear she might understand it. Yet she couldn’t help crying, “What’re they doin’? What’re they doin’?”
The horse roared and raged, his penis fully erect, and tried to break from the stall.
“What’re they doin’?” Cissy shrieked.
Ewell gave the signal. Burt grabbed her and Lem started to pull her clothes off.
“Quit that!” Mike shouted. He still didn’t know what the moment demanded of him, laughing or fighting, and he was doing both. “What the hell are you doing? Quit that!”
The other men were screaming with laughter. Burt jabbed at the girl, “How big’s your cunt?” he yelled.
“Can you take a horse cock?”
“Hold her legs! Give her the big prick!”
She screamed, she didn’t stop screaming.
Mike was punching, aimless punches, wild, at anything, not laughing anymore. Somebody hit him with a tire iron. The stall door opened and Big Marco reared, shot his forelegs up, then forward, and stormed out of the stall, out of the stable, running wild in the paddock. Cissy kept screaming and Mike felt blood on his face, and fell.
Toward dawn Mike came back to consciousness, covered with blood, an excruciating pain in the left side of his head. There was no sign of the men, but Cissy lay naked a few feet away from him, on the stable floor, more bloodied than he was, with the tire iron in her vagina.
The case came up for trial about two months later, when she still could barely walk. Ewell’s friends had jumped bail and disappeared. In their absence, Ewell was able to blame it all on Lem and Burt. He and Mike, he claimed, had tri
ed to prevent the attack on the girl and had, in fact, prevented the others from killing her. Thanks to Cissy’s memory—all she could clearly remember was that Mike kept yelling no, no, no—Mike was fined five hundred dollars and Ewell was fined a thousand dollars and given six months in jail, sentence suspended.
Then Cissy disappeared. Somebody reported she had been seen working the wharves of Galveston, taking on anybody, young and old, dirty and clean, and that she now wore a wig because she had shaved her head to get rid of the lice in her hair. Somebody else said she had been arrested in the Panhandle for sitting naked in a movie theater, playing with herself. The stories all went to prove, according to Ewell, that Cissy hadn’t been much to begin with, had deserved whatever she had gotten, and good riddance. But Mike kept looking for her, certain she needed help and feeling she couldn’t have gone far, for she hadn’t any means of managing distance.
He found her by the sheerest fluke. There used to be a hot dog stand out on one of the main highways, a vast empty stretch where Route 73 turned north. He would stop there on occasion to get a Coke and a chili dog. One day, on a trip to Fort Worth, he passed the stand and noticed that the place was out of business, boarded up. But just as he got past it he saw her.
She had taken squatter’s rights in the abandoned place, making the makeshift do, living in the dark, hiding. She didn’t recognize him at first. Visit by visit—he came to see her only sporadically—she let herself remember who he was. Sometimes she even recalled his name. On rare occasions she could recollect the Red Rio Bar and things he had told her there.
He wondered if she would remember him.
He got to the building about midnight. She’d be asleep, he realized, and it was foolish of him to have come; certainly he wouldn’t want to wake her. Well, he didn’t really want to see her, just to give her something. He’d leave the two bags of groceries at the back door and return to the city.
As he carried them to the rear he noticed there was no light indoors. Of course. As he had guessed, she was asleep. He had already turned to go when he heard her.
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