Bad Weather

by Paul Austin Ardoin

  “I don’t know,” said Dez.

  “Well, stop it,” said Rhonda. “I will admit she’s hot as hell, but something’s going on with her. You don’t lie like that—not even her real name, for God’s sake—without something being serial-killer level wrong with you.”

  Dez laughed. “She’s not a serial killer.”

  “You don’t know that,” Rhonda pointed out. “Lots of serial killers look like normal people.”

  “I don’t think any serial killer has looked like Frankie.”

  “She is absolutely not worth it,” Rhonda said. “You said yourself you were disappointed in the sex. She might be hot, but it’s not worth it if the sex isn’t good. It’s not even worth it if she’s totally sane if the sex isn’t good.”

  “I thought you said all she needed was a good teacher.”

  “Now don’t you go changing the subject,” Rhonda said. “I know that look. You think you can change her. You think that she’s going to get better in the sack once she has a little more Dez under her belt.”

  Dez tapped her fingers on the steering wheel and didn’t say anything.

  “You’re just as bad as Gabby.”

  “I am not,” Dez said sharply. “Frankie’s not abusive.”

  “You’ve been on one date,” Rhonda said. “But Gabby ignored all the red flags with Dominic, just like you’re doing with Frankie. I hate it enough that I have a complete prick for a brother-in-law. I’m not going to see my best friend do the same thing.”

  “I’m fine,” Dez insisted.

  “That’s what Gabby said too, right when I saw the bruises on her arm.”

  “There are no bruises on my arm, Rhonda. Back off.”

  Rhonda held her hands out in front of her. “Sorry, Dez. I call ’em like I see ’em.”

  “You can stop calling this one.”

  Rhonda put her hands down as they rolled to a stop at the red light just in front of their apartment complex. “Maybe it’s this rain. I’m not used to it. Maybe it’s making me cranky.”

  ◆◆◆

  Dez took her jacket off when she went upstairs and couldn’t get the musty, damp smell out of the room. Her jacket wouldn’t be able to dry out completely tonight, she knew. Southern California wasn’t built for this kind of rain.

  She saw Exodus Nights on her nightstand.

  Dez sighed. She wasn’t sure what Frankie or Jennifer was or wasn’t, or who she was, or what she did, but it was clear that she was very passionate about the writing of Frank Bethany—whoever he was and whatever he did. She picked up the book and turned it over, looking for clues. She thumbed through the end pages until she found the acknowledgments, but there was no Jennifer mentioned in the long list of thank yous. Just for good measure, Dez checked for the name Frankie too—no luck.

  The call of the book was still strong, however, and she decided to read some more of it before she went to bed. She looked at the clock; it wasn’t even nine. She thought about her Friday; she only had one class, and that was at nine o’clock, and there wasn’t anything due. She should probably get started on the term paper—it was a class called Legal Analysis of Police Actions, which had sounded yawn-inducing, but had become one of the most interesting classes she had taken during her four years at Long Beach. It was a good thing, too; not only did she need it to graduate, but as her only Friday class, it might have been very easy to skip if it weren’t so interesting.

  She took off her clothes and put on a pair of soft flannel pajamas. They had been in a care package from her mother. She had invited her mother out to visit, hoping to convince her to eventually move, as there was, Dez thought, no future for her in Lake Charles, but a fear of the unknown and an aversion to flying had kept her mother at home.

  Once she had her pajamas on, she considered a moment: television—she had missed The Cosby Show, but had over an hour before L.A. Law came on—but thought that Exodus Nights had probably exerted its pull over her enough to win over television this evening.

  She called down to Rhonda, who was watching the final scenes of Martin, that she was heading to bed. Rhonda shouted something back, but not loud enough for Dez to hear. She assumed it was caustic or sexual in nature. Perhaps it was both; Rhonda was getting skilled at that.

  She went into the bathroom, removed her glasses, and took off her makeup. Her face was very close to the mirror, and with her flat nose, wide-set eyes, and dark, short, tightly-curled hair, she wondered what Frankie saw in her. She had purposely made herself less feminine since leaving for college; once she realized that she wasn’t the only lesbian on the floor of her dorm, never mind the university—the school actually had a group that met twice a month—she started dressing in jeans and tailored pants, in long-sleeve, button-down Oxford shirts, instead of the dresses, skirts, and blouses her mother had insisted on. She cut her hair close to her head at the beginning of sophomore year; when her mother saw a picture, she almost had a fit, and Dez wasn’t sure that the talk about getting closer to her African heritage assuaged her or simply made it worse. But that was when she figured out that her mother suspected.

  Dez had once asked Rhonda what had happened when she came out to her parents at the end of her junior year. It had been painful for Rhonda to talk about, and she hadn’t said anything the first couple of times. It took a couple of shots of Goldschläger for Rhonda to start talking.

  Her father had cut her off with barely a word. Her mother sneaked care packages to her every now and then, and spoke about it being a phase that she’d grow out of. Rhonda had had to apply for financial aid for her tuition and room and board, and working thirty hours a week and going full-time during the summers helped pay for her half of the apartment.

  In fact, a lot of the people in the Lambda Support Network group had similar experiences. Many parents had either turned their backs on their children completely or pretended that it wasn’t real. Many of the students still hadn’t come out to their parents. Some of the ones who did disappeared from school soon after—shipping back home, often to the Central Valley or Imperial Valley, where they would likely move back in with their parents to get “straightened out.”

  Dez didn’t want that life for herself; she didn’t want to tell her mother until she had a job and wasn’t under her thumb. She really wasn’t under her mother’s thumb now—her track scholarship was for a full ride, including room and board, which covered the university-owned off-campus apartment she and Rhonda shared. And track didn’t start until the spring, although with the wet weather she knew she’d be in trouble if she didn’t figure out a way to get going on her sprints soon.

  She supposed there wouldn’t have been any reason not to tell her mom. Except she didn’t want to face that. She didn’t want to hear the disappointment in her voice, like Rhonda had heard, or the abject denial of what she was, the idea that it was just a phase or something she chose. She remembered in high school, when she stayed home from the prom, how she would have given anything to be attracted to one of the boys on the basketball team or the baseball team or even the chess club. She envied the girl who pushed to take another girl as her date. The thought of herself doing that was frightening—she couldn’t even fathom it. And she heard the talk from the school administrators and the parents and the other students, either tut-tutting it, expressing their vocal support—or, like the boys in her English class, graphically expressing their desire to see the two girls go at it.

  Dez snapped back to the present. She had been staring into her own eyes in the mirror for far too long.

  She shook her head, wiped the excess moisturizer off her hand, and brushed her teeth. She walked back into her room and got an extra pillow from her closet, arranging it on the bed perpendicular to the other pillows, a decent back rest for her to get into a good position to continue reading.

  She got into bed, and pulled the covers up, which she rarely had an opportunity to do; it was almost never cold enough. The pounding rain had a dreamy, hypnotic quality to it, and it had been going on
so long that it had dipped down into the high forties, almost a record low in Long Beach. She shivered. Southern California had made her soft.

  She opened Exodus Nights to where she had left off. But it was an almost surreal experience—now reading it with the knowledge that the man in the photograph actually was real, was in fact not a figment of Frankie’s imagination, or her uncle. She found the truth far less comforting than the fiction Frankie had made up—and that Dez had, she grudgingly admitted to herself, believed.

  Because the thing was, it was a very believable fiction. Dez thought she could discern the female voice in the prose; the lilting rhythms of some of the scenes, as gruesome and as hard to read as they often were.

  The chapter ended, and the new chapter started out with criminals who were talking about the bar they were going to rob. When they walked into the bar, Dez pictured the leather bar in Soho from Frankie’s first story. She could feel it with all of her senses—she could smell the sweat on the patrons intermingling with the leather, could see the wafting tobacco and marijuana smoke, could hear the loud, high-pitched clacking of the pool balls being struck on the break.

  The mirror behind the two robbers shattered, and soon they were racing through the streets on foot with the bouncer chasing them with a shotgun.

  And then, as the two men were escaping, they began to have a philosophical conversation. It was about life, it was about their childhoods, it was about their attitudes toward death and sex and food. The first man said they would get away because the bouncer had broken a mirror, and that was seven years of bad luck. The second man began to talk about his childhood in Colombia, and all of the superstitions his abuelita followed. Eating twelve grapes at midnight of the new year. Wearing yellow underwear to attract fortune and wealth. Never putting her handbag on the floor.

  The first man talked about his aunt, who had always demanded that they eat their pieces of pie backward and save the points for a wish. And then a black butterfly descended down from the sky and flew with them as the two men ran together. The second man turned and ran screaming away from the black butterfly—and was struck by the blast of the shotgun.

  Dez set the book down. The story about eating the pie backward wasn’t a common practice—or at least, she had never heard of it before. And to hear it coming out of Frankie’s mouth and to read it in a Frank Bethany novel within twenty-four hours of each other was too coincidental to be—well, a coincidence.

  Had Frankie deliberately told Dez that story, just to see how far she might have been in the novel? There was no way, Dez thought, that Frankie hadn’t been aware of the pie story in Exodus Nights—and she definitely knew that Dez had started reading it. Was Frankie playing games? Was she just trying to get Dez on her side?

  Instead of putting her to sleep, reading Exodus Nights had agitated Dez. She swung her legs out of bed and stood up. She paced around the room for a minute, and then went downstairs. Rhonda was still watching television.

  “Hey, Dez,” Rhonda said, muting the television. “Need me to turn this down?”

  “No, it’s not that,” Dez said. “I just had a real interesting connection between something Frankie said that was supposedly from her childhood, and something I just read in that Frank Bethany book.”

  “The one that Frankie says she wrote.”

  “I’m starting to think that maybe the real Frank Bethany plagiarized it from Frankie,” Dez said.

  Rhonda shook her head. “Listen, Dez, I don’t know what’s going on with Frankie or Jennifer or whoever she is, but you’ve gotta see that getting involved in this isn’t a good idea, right?”

  Dez was quiet.

  “This isn’t just one or two things that are warning signs, either,” Rhonda continued. “This is a guy on the airport runway with those light-up orange flares, crossing them in an X to try to stop you from landing your plane on Frankie’s runway.”

  Dez scoffed. “Well, that’s poetic.”

  “I can fuckin’ be Shakespeare when I wanna be,” said Rhonda. “My advice is to stay away from Frankie. There’s stuff here that will get you in trouble.”

  Dez looked at the ceiling.

  “What is it with you and her, anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” Dez mumbled. “I guess I just find it really interesting. She says a lot of fascinating stuff. She makes me think.”

  “She introduces you to new authors,” Rhonda said sarcastically.

  “Girl, shut the hell up,” Dez said, but a smile played at the corners of her mouth.

  “Seriously,” Rhonda said, “you’ve got enough drama in your life. You don’t need to keep pursuing this girl.”

  “Especially with my super-dramatic roommate.”

  “I know. So much drama with me bringing home a gorgeous girl every weekend.”

  “Whatever, Rhonda.”

  “You know you’re just jealous of my game.”

  Dez smiled and turned to go upstairs. Rhonda looked at the television and unmuted it. The show was back on.

  Dez went into her room and climbed into bed, then turned off her reading light. She wanted to think about Frankie and that cherry dress and her eyes and her lips and the feel of her fingers, but she pushed it out of her mind and turned the pillows around to a more comfortable sleeping position. She sighed. She thought she’d have a lot of trouble falling asleep, especially as she heard the faint sounds of the television from downstairs. But she was asleep within the minute, dreaming of lifeboats, animal transformations, and black butterflies.

  8

  The aptly named Dr. Robert Gallows never failed to remind his students of his previous success as a prosecutor in Los Angeles county. But even his high conviction rate, his many press interviews, and his guest appearance on a popular cop show failed to fill his Friday morning class. Legal Analysis of Police Actions needed a better title and time slot. Those students who signed up for his classes were treated to fascinating if long-winded stories week in and week out. Dez appreciated the fervor with which Dr. Gallows gave many of his lectures. The details of many of the cases were dry, but he injected color and dark humor—“Gallows humor,” as he said with a twinkle in his eye—in the blandest of cases to make them sing.

  Not only that, Dr. Gallows was one of the best legal minds that Dez had met—although she hadn’t met that many great legal minds. So she decided to stay behind to talk to the professor after class. He preferred the informality of the post-class question-and-answer period to regular office hours, especially on Fridays, when the lecture hall wasn’t being used in the ten o’clock hour. Dez preferred it too; some of the professors were downright creepy, especially with the female students, and the open forum was much better—and, Dez thought, safer—than a cramped office where the door could be locked.

  There were a couple of students in front of her, and Dez took the time to try to figure out how she was going to frame the question. She stopped and started through a couple of different scenarios, and finally, as the last student in front of her was wrapping up, decided on the direct approach.

  “Ah,” Dr. Gallows said, “Miss Roubideaux.” He pronounced it properly, the French way, with the silent X. Dez was fairly impressed that in a lecture class of a hundred and ten students, he was able to recognize her by sight. Dr. Gallows wasn’t very tall—about five foot four, and Dez had about two inches on him—but he was impeccably put together, even on a Friday: a navy Brooks Brothers suit, recently-buffed brown wingtips, a starched white shirt, and, in the only tip-of-the-hat to informality, a J. Garcia tie in an expressionistic crimson and royal blue pattern. It didn’t exactly match the suit, but, Dez thought, it was close enough for a Friday college lecture. His hair and full beard were neatly trimmed; the beard, Dez could see up close, hid a weak chin. She found herself wondering if he would even approve of facial hair had he not felt the need to cover up a weakness in his face.

  “Hi, Dr. Gallows. I’ve got a question for you—kind of a practical application question.”

  “Oh, good,
not on the material.” Dr. Gallows’ eyes lit up. “It’s always nice to mix things up a bit. What do you have for me, my dear?”

  Dez chose her words carefully. “I’ve come across a pretty famous novel that I think might have been plagiarized,” she said. “And I wonder what, uh, what can be done about it. What might happen to the guy who says he wrote it, and the woman who actually did write it.”

  “Hmm.” Dr. Gallows stroked his beard and seemed lost in thought. “Well, Miss Roubideaux, are you asking about criminal charges?”

  Dez hesitated.

  “Because, as it pertains to this class, I’m not sure there’s a lot of relevance to the course material.”

  “Of course,” Dez said quickly. “I mean, I didn’t think that there was anything we’d cover in class about this. I just thought—you know, with your background and all...”

  “Yes, yes,” Dr. Gallows said, absentmindedly. “It’s just that I have much more experience with criminal cases than with civil. And, should the author who feels wronged decide to pursue this, it’s much more likely that she’ll get satisfaction from a civil trial than a criminal one.”

  “Of course,” Dez said again.

  “The burden of proof would be on her—your friend,” he said.

  Dez almost interrupted to say that the author wasn’t her friend, but thought better of it.

  “And not only would she have to prove that the novel in question was stolen,” Gallows continued, “but she’d have to prove that she actually suffered damages—usually financial.” He cleared his throat. “It’s not enough, either, to determine that the idea for a book was taken. It has to be demonstrably proven that it was an idea that was close enough to the final product to be actionable.”

  “You’re saying it’s kind of a high bar,” Dez said.

  Dr. Gallows nodded. “It’s meant to be a high bar,” he mused. “The United States places a high value on innovation and iteration, and while we have a strong notion of ownership in this country, it must be balanced with the idea that the world is a better place when people build on each other. It isn’t the friendliest country in the world to defend intellectual property, though it is better than many. But iterating on good ideas—whether it’s the telegraph, the personal computer, or, in this case, perhaps, a novel—is highly valued by the American legal system. So I’d say your friend has a tough row to hoe.”