“On what grounds?” Birdy asked finally.
“Grounds?”
“What are your grounds for divorce? I’ve been a good wife to you, faithful, caring. I gave you a son. You’re the one who ruined everything. What possible reason could you have for leaving me?”
Helman faced her then. With his piercing blue eyes and infectious smile, he’d once borne a passing resemblance to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid–era Paul Newman, but his skin had grown pouchy and loose and the lines around his mouth made him look perpetually dissatisfied. “I don’t love you anymore,” he said.
Birdy smoothed her covers. “Oh. I see.”
“And I’m pretty sure you don’t love me either. Otherwise, none of this would have happened.”
So that’s what he thought. That’s how he accounted for her retreat from the world. She had no idea his understanding of her, of marriage, of humanity, was so limited, so misguided. Cows. He understood cows. And pasteurization. He’d taught himself to say “hello” and “good-bye” and “you’re fired” in Spanish. Otherwise he was entirely clueless.
“I think,” Helman said, “with all that’s going on, you know, with the dairy and the case and whatnot, that this is really the best thing. For both of us.”
So there was another woman. That’s what that “best thing for both of us” statement meant. Wasn’t that exactly what Birdy’s father told Birdy’s mother—“Going our separate ways is really the best thing, for both of us”—when the truth was he’d fallen in hopeless love with the black bra’ed moonlighting waitress with her frogs and lily pads and talk of princes and princesses? Together, the bra and frogs and lily pads, not to mention Birdy’s father’s hopeless romanticism, conspired to lay waste to Birdy’s happy family, all of it coming to an ugly climax the day Birdy’s mother threw her father out of the house. Literally. She tossed everything that belonged to him out the window—shirts, pants, watches, ties, every volume of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, his collection of stethoscopes and antique medical implements, his razors and bottles of aftershave, the heavy blue-plated radio he kept in his study as company on late nights. A few ties and shirts didn’t make it to the lawn. They stuck to the window casing like white flags, distress signals. The rest lay on the grass in a heap, the radio on and tuned to a baseball game going into extra innings. Boys from the neighborhood kept walking by to check the score.
“Does she work at the fair?” Birdy asked Helman.
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Never mind.”
The day nurse came in to take Birdy’s vitals. Helman watched for a moment while the nurse strapped the blood pressure sleeve around Birdy’s upper arm and pressed a stethoscope to her chest. Then he put on his hat and stood, a sure sign he was ready to leave. Birdy knew all his signs. She supposed she would have to unlearn them.
“Good news,” the nurse told him, pulling the stethoscope from her ears. “Your wife is going to live.”
* * *
Birdy had her tornado dream again. This one was familiar. She’d had it a million times before. She was in a house that wasn’t exactly her house. It was her childhood home mixed with her farmhouse mixed with an apartment she’d seen on TV years ago—plush curtains framing windows that let in darkness and wind and rain, wall-to-wall cream carpets, potted tropical plants scattered here and there among a wealth of elegant, Regency-era furniture. Birdy looked down. She was in a gauzy, flowing nightgown, aquamarine as usual. She ran her hands over the fabric. So soft, so fragile, like something Bette Davis would have worn and not the most convenient attire for surviving a storm, but when the firemen came later to check on her at least she could say she was fit to be seen. On her feet were two impossibly tiny, high-heeled silk slippers with feathery pom-poms over the toes. She did a quick two-step and took herself to the window. That was how she moved in this particular dream—like she was a possession, a polished settee to be moved around the room until she found exactly the right place for herself. She watched the black clouds whirl and mass themselves into a funnel shape. She wasn’t afraid. More fascinated. How insignificant I am, she thought. How replaceable. Still, she had no desire to die. The minute the train sound rent the air and the tornado—solid now and big shouldered—puts its toe down in the north field, she would get to lower ground. Then she would be safe.
She took herself to her basement door, but the door and the wall around it weren’t doing so well. They looked more like snowmelt than the solid wood and plaster she was used to. The stairs leading to safety weren’t there either. There was just this wavy mess. The mess was getting on her shoes. This was new. This was a strange development. Should she run through it like one would a waterfall? Should she take herself through to the other side? But what was on the other side? The nice firemen with their dimpled chins and kind, capable arms? Or something sinister? The woman in the hat shooing her. Useless. Useless. Birdy did not know what to do with herself. She stood there and waited as the howling at her back grew louder and louder. There were splinters in her hair. Glass in her arms, carpet in her mouth. I am becoming something else, she thought. I am becoming my house which is not my house. Well, look at that.
* * *
Birdy woke on her own. It was early morning. Sunlight was just starting to stream in through the window and a band of it traversed Birdy’s chenille spread in a wide, dusty stripe. The blue curtain had been pulled back and Birdy’s young roommate was gone. In her place was the fierce day nurse, stripping the bed and mumbling to herself about “white woman mess” and “white woman stink.”
“Where is she?” Birdy asked, feeling a moment’s elation at having the room to herself.
“Gone home, presumably,” the nurse said. “No insurance, couldn’t afford to stay. You know what she says to me? She says, ‘Thanks, Obama.’” The nurse blew air out the side of her pretty mouth. “Because it’s his fault her workplace is a pole.”
The roommate’s boyfriend bouquet lay in a heap on the floor and the soft whiff of rotting petals imbued the room with something bride-like. At least that was Birdy’s opinion. The nurse was merely annoyed. She swept a litter of brown-tipped petals into a wastebasket and murmured, “Sweets for the sour.” A whole carnation, stemless and shriveled, skidded along the tile, coming to rest against Birdy’s ankle.
“Hey, Mrs. Yoder,” the nurse said from across the room, “you’re finally getting what you want.”
Birdy thought of Helman and his sweaty, dented hat. “I can’t imagine what you mean.”
“You’re getting a new roommate. It’s like transferring rooms, only better. And since you were born to better, you should be happy to hear the woman is minor Midwestern royalty. Heir to a casket company fortune. Or something like that.”
Birdy shuddered. How morbid. And tacky. Coffins indeed. When Birdy got out of this horrible place, one of the first things she would do was put on her mother’s strand of pearls. Then she would wear them every day for the rest of her life. I’ll never take them off, she thought. Not to sleep. Not even to shower. Then the world would know what kind of woman she was and, when she saw herself passing a mirror, she would know, too.
The nurse picked up something shiny off the ground and dropped it in her scrubs pocket, mumbling, “Mine now.” She started to leave but ducked her head back in the room and gave Birdy an almost smile. “I’ll be right back with your eight A.M. dose.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Birdy said.
“What’s that?”
“I don’t need my eight A.M. dose, thank you very much.”
“Really?”
Birdy took some lotion from her bedside table and massaged it into her skin. Her hands were the wrinkled and much-veined hands of a woman in late middle age, the fingernails losing luster, the knuckles somewhat swollen. Arthritis would hit soon, Birdy supposed. First the knotting, then the pain. Her mother’s hands were gnarled and clawlike at the end. Birdy’s would probably look like that, too, in ten, maybe fifteen yea
rs’ time. But for now they were steady and mostly straight and Birdy wondered what sort of work they might do.
“Really,” she said.
The nurse shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
Birdy supposed there was nothing else to do but suit herself now. She would check herself out of this hospital, tomorrow or the day after that, and then there would be decisions to make, decisions about Wally, where they would live, what their lives would look like without Helman. For a moment it was as if she were standing on the edge of a sheer cliff, everything falling away from her, the scornful woman in the trucker hat, Ms. You’re Useless herself, at the bottom, daring Birdy to be something other than a rich white woman with cool rags for once. Birdy touched her naked throat. She could feel the pearls there, taking shape. One by one.
Red Herring
(May)
The bloodstain reminded Randy of a Darwin fish. It had the same curved but smooth top like the flight of a line drive, and the matching convex bottom intersected it, fanned out into a tail. Also two feet seemed to jut out from the underbelly. Commas. Sharp turns. The blot, big enough to warrant two traffic cones with police tape wrapped around, looked like it could up and walk away if it wanted to. Instead it stayed put, and Randy couldn’t really believe he was here again, in front of Breeder’s Laundromat, staring at dried blood on the sidewalk.
“Randy.”
“Yeah, Jack.”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Doubt it.”
“That this is Daisy Gonzalez’s blood.”
“Then definitely no. Didn’t you read the paper? This blood is from the Ranasack Apartments people. It’s some sort of statement.”
“But Chief.”
“Yeah, Zane.”
“This is the same spot, isn’t it?”
“The very same.”
Three years before, Tina Gonzalez had died on this sidewalk. Still unsolved, the accident was one of the saddest Randy had ever witnessed. Someone had hopped a curb, hit Tina and her little girl (Daisy, Daisy, where are you? The thought an ulcer in his gut, burning), and kept driving. It happened on a day like this one, blue sky, white puffy cartoon clouds. The only so-called clues found at the scene were two fake legs lying near Tina’s body like those of a spooning lover. Strange and spooky enough, they were clean of fingerprints and struck Randy more as red herrings than anything else.
“I see Saturn,” Zane Bigsby said, pointing at the blood. “Rings and all.”
“I see Uranus,” Jack McElroy joked.
What Randy would never forget from that day, besides Daisy giving the ravaged Hector a wan smile from the back of the ambulance, was Tina’s handprint in blood, fingers seeming to stretch toward Daisy’s impossibly tiny left shoe, left behind.
Randy rubbed his face. His stubble felt like sand. “Tell Em I’m going to be in the Bottoms if she needs to get ahold of me.”
Jack and Zane shot each other a look.
“What?” Randy asked.
“Well, it’s just—” Jack started.
“No offense meant, Chief, but we think you’re barking up the wrong tree there.”
“Yeah,” Jack agreed. “It’s like it’s not even a tree. It’s a bush. Or maybe some kind of houseplant.”
Randy sighed. “What are you talking about?”
“You’re going to question Basketball Juan again, right?”
“I don’t know, Jack. Maybe. Why?”
Zane shrugged and picked his ear. “It wasn’t him.”
Randy agreed but didn’t want to say so. “What makes you so sure?”
“A hunch,” Jack said. “A gut feeling.”
“And besides,” Zane said. “He’s too nice.”
“And he kind of loves her.”
It was true. During interrogation Juan Cardoza had broken down in sobs, making the kind of sad, donkey-like sounds men do when they can’t control themselves and don’t care who’s listening.
Maria Pinto, Juan’s beautiful interpreter and the same woman who shouted down Chuck Breeder a few days before in front of the Laundromat, basically called Randy, his deputies, and their suspicions absolute bullshit. “Seriously?” she said. “This is the guy you think took Daisy? Look at him. He’s a mess.”
Juan had a disfigured face and a lazy eye that watered even when he wasn’t crying. On top of that, he seemed unable to sit still for long periods of time. Like a child, he kept reaching for things that weren’t his and whining. And then there was the basketball situation. Em had tried to confiscate it when Juan came in the station—“The weirdest things make the best weapons,” she said—but the man refused to hand it over. He clung to it like it was a life vest and the ship was going down.
“No no no no no,” Juan kept saying, shaking his shaved head and backing away from Em into a corner between the water cooler and the file cabinet. “No. No. No. No.”
Maria stepped in, whispering something in Juan’s right ear. Whatever she said calmed him, and he was able to answer Randy’s first set of questions without much difficulty. “How do you know Daisy Gonzalez?” “She’s my friend.” “Where did you last see her?” “Basketball court.” “When?” “After school.” “What were you and Daisy doing the day she disappeared?” “Playing.” “Playing what?” “Basketball.” “But then you stopped playing, right?” “It started to rain. I went inside.” “Where did Daisy go?” “Home.” “Did you go with her?” “No, I went inside.” Randy showed Juan the picture of him and Daisy that had been anonymously sent to the station the night the girl went missing. Juan started to cry. He held his basketball in front of his face and wept.
Maria, stunning and furious, stood and stuck a pointy fingernail in Randy’s chest. “You know what I think?” She was so close he could smell her—hairspray and vanilla. “I think you have no idea what’s happened to Daisy and that scares you to death. You know that if you don’t solve this case you’ll lose your job and so you need a scapegoat, an easy target, and who’s better than Juan, a weirdo Mexican who can’t speak English and thinks a basketball’s his baby? Pathetic. That’s what you are. A fat fish in a small pond. A big-mouthed bass swimming around all self-important like you know something when what you’re really doing is shitting in the water.”
Randy supposed he should have reprimanded her, and Zane and Jack were prepared to haul her into a holding cell for assaulting a police officer, but Randy let her rant because she was right. He was a big fish and Colliersville was the tiniest pond imaginable. He was also pathetic, a force of one, three if you counted Jack and Zane, but who counted them? They only worked part-time, preferring to moonlight for the fire department because that job came with a cot and regular meals and instant female regard.
People gave Randy grief all the time, said he was small potatoes, Barney Fife blah blah blah, and to a certain extent, it was true. Still, just because Colliersville was a quiet town with a relatively low crime rate, that didn’t mean it had all been bike derbies and lollipops. Randy had met quite a few lowlifes in his day and no mistake. Fellows missing their conscience, guys who’d just as soon stick their mother’s head in a juicer as wipe their own behinds. A few women, too, blowsy broads whose idea of fun was to leave their kids tied by the ankle to the bathroom radiator for the night while they went out to Sharkey’s for four blenders’ worth of margs. The majority of the criminals he’d had the misfortune to meet since he’d taken over for his father eight years before had been a pack of unfortunates. Fatties, a lot of them, and dirt-poor and dragged through the ditch and gutter and muck by their thumbs. Faces like worm-eaten wood. Teeth even worse. Hair just barely hanging on.
Randy realized, looking into Maria’s bright eyes, that he’d never seen Niagara Falls. He had also never seen the Statue of Liberty, the Grand Canyon, or the redwoods. That was police work for you. Long hours. All ugliness, no beauty. A life half-lived.
“Juan’s a red herring, like the legs,” he said to himself. And the stain. He’d forgotten for a moment where h
e was. He’d forgotten Zane and Jack were even there.
“A herring, Chief?” Zane said. “What do fish have to do with it?”
Randy sighed. “I’m talking about the logical fallacy red herring. Not the fish.”
“What do dicks have to do with it?” Jack asked.
Everyone in town had a theory about what might have happened to Daisy Gonzalez, and Randy was, of course, party to them all. He kept a careful record of every lead and accusation in a notebook he carried in his back pocket. Most of the ideas were far-fetched, ridiculous even, and clearly voiced to settle scores. Shellie Pogue came to the station to cast suspicion on her former best friend and current nemesis, Helen Garrety—“She hasn’t been right since her grandson went to war,” Shellie said, “and really, what is she doing out there all alone on that farm of hers with those ‘organic’ herbs?”—and Helman Yoder, himself in hot water and awaiting trial, told Randy he thought that Gordy/Ramon person, who acted as Randy’s informant in the dairy shutdown, might have skipped town with the girl as “insult to injury.” Fingers had been pointed not only at Juan Cardoza but at Hank Seaver, Fikus Ward, and a handful of other unsavory elements living in Maple Leaf Mobile Home Park, including the Tucker boys, Jack’s uncle Lloyd, and Irv Peoples, the hermit roadkill collector whom Randy heard had a stash of axes in his garage and loved the sight of spilled blood.
Randy was ashamed to admit, even to himself, that he had no idea who had taken Daisy or what they might have done with her/were doing to her at that very moment. Which meant that Maria was right about that, too. He was a failure at his job and it was just a matter of time before someone with enough power to do so stripped him of his badge and sent him home to his wife, who, Randy supposed, would greet the news the way she greeted everything these days: with a shrug and a “That sucks, sweetie,” just before turning back to her computer to play Candy Crush or Words with Friends.
“Personally,” Jack said, “I think some out-of-town pedophile’s to blame. You know, some twisted fuck with kiddie porn all over his computer.”
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