"Okay," Billy had said. It was the only word exchanged between them.
It was the only moment in which their eyes had truly met.
Okay, he repeated silently, watching the gray scenery whip past below the same sky-smothering layer of clouds. He didn't know how much she remembered of his visit last night, how much of a shadow lay between the point where she'd blacked out, broken, and the point where she'd awakened in a considerable state of repair. He could not—would not—apply the touch that would enable him to know.
Any more than he would play her with words.
Any more than he would erase the memories altogether.
This one is yours, he continued, addressing her in imaginary, internal conversation. This is the fight that only you can win. I have spared your body disfigurement and months of painful healing. To spare you any more would be to spare you the chance to grow.
And you would never forgive me for sparing you that.
There is integrity in facing the pain. There is integrity in facing the horror. Everything that my life has taught me has been confirmed in the last few days.
I will not rob you of your integrity.
No matter how much it hurts you.
No matter how much it hurts me.
The rear window on the right-hand side was open just enough for Bubba to poke his snoot through the crack. Billy held him close, basking in the animal warmth, the simple purity of living and loving that was Bubba's natural state of being.
Billy needed that warmth, now more than ever.
As their journey drew to a close.
Dave Hart had been ringing the outside doorbell for nearly two minutes when the cab pulled up at the curb beside him. He had a lingering dull ache in his skull, a staggering amount of dread in his heart, and a huge bouquet of flowers in his alien-feeling right hand.
When Bubba jumped out of the backseat, he thought what a funny-looking dog.
When Billy followed, he thought omigod, and the flowers nearly dropped to the pavement.
When Mona emerged behind them, he clung to the flowers with all his might, and the dread became a living thing that crawled inside his chest.
"Mona," he whispered, taking two steps toward them. For all the power of his singing voice, that was all the wind that he could whip up.
"Dave," Billy said, engaging the eye contact that Mona would not. "Be cool, okay?"
The first thing Dave felt was a tingling in his hands, hot and balming as Ben-Gay lotion. The second thing he felt was a burst of instinctive terror as the dog came loping toward him.
Then a bright light went off inside his head; and when consciousness returned a split second later, the fear was gone.
Which was good, because that was when Bubba jumped up, forepaws bracing against Dave's chest, checking him out with canine exuberance. Dave laughed, automatically stroking the blunt head with one hand, holding the flowers away with the second.
Mona wordlessly moved past him, to the door. Her keys were already in her hand. Billy walked just behind her, pacing her, gauging her steps for any sign of weakness or loss of balance.
None came, and the door swung open. Billy made a c'mon, you guys motion that was, from Dave's perspective, surprisingly warm.
The four of them went up.
"I can't believe you people," Lisa was saying as she moved like a dervish from the sink to the stove. "And I think that you should leave before she gets here. Okay?"
"Not okay," Paula said. Susan was right beside her. "I don't think that you've given us a chance."
"I haven't given you a chance!" Lisa yelled, a rat-a-tat of humorless laughter on its heels. She whirled and aimed a finger at Paula's head. "I gave you the chance to be a decent human being when I called and told you that I wouldn't be able to make our meeting this evening. Twenty minutes later the whole gang is here, trying to hustle me into letting you talk to her!"
"We don't 'hustle," Susan informed her coldly. 'That's a male sup—"
"BULLSHIT!" Lisa erupted, slamming her fist against the stove. Susan's wire-rimmed glasses seemed to fog, just a little. "You've got it all figured out, don't you? Anything that sounds bad is male supremist dogma; then you go ahead and do the same thing, only you use a more flattering set of catchphrases. What do you call what you're doing here? 'Enlightened self-interest'?"
"You're letting your personal feelings get in the way," Paula said, low and measured. "This is a war we're fighting here—"
"I've got news for you, sister," Lisa cut in. "When you lose your compassion, you've already lost the war."
The sound of ascending footsteps was audible from the stairwell. All eyes shifted to the doorway. Lisa hissed through her teeth; it was too late to boot them before Mona's arrival.
"If anybody says one single word to her," she said, "I will break their fucking necks."
The sentiment had a second to soak in before the door swung open . . .
. . . and then Bubba was through the door and madly cruising. He loved it here at Mona and Lisa's. He loved the smell: the air alive with perfume and incense and musky-sweet girl sweat. Bubba always reverted back to puppyhood when he came over to visit.
Right now, that entailed doing multiple laps around the kitchen table. Lisa was there, bubbling over with sudden happy noise. He did another turn and then jumped up at her, burying his nose between her breasts as she skritched behind his ears.
But there were other people here—new people, strangers—so he jumped back down and took another wild spin, then zeroed in on the big chunky one. She was in heat, just now. Bubba always loved it when that happened.
Without a moment's hesitation, he drove his nose into her crotch, while he humped against her left knee with gay abandon.
"GET OFF OF ME!" Paula screamed, pushing at the dog with both hands. It fell back, looking startled and stupid. "GET BACK, I SAY!" she continued, bringing her right foot back to deliver a kick.
"Bubba, no." A calm male voice, from the doorway, softly authoritative. The dog backed away, and the man walked into the room. It was the one who had sat through Between Our Thighs twice, the dancer's boyfriend/auditionee. He didn't look nearly as slick as he had the last time they'd met.
But he looked easily twice as intense.
And he didn't look happy to see her. At all.
Paula took a glance over at Lisa, whose eyes had widened to nearly the size of Susan B. Anthony dollars. The editor was staring out into the doorway, with a very strange mixture of shock and joy on her face. Paula spent a moment trying to understand why.
And then Mona came through the door.
She was not on a stretcher. She wasn't even on crutches: There were no visible bandages swathing her at all. She wasn't even missing any teeth.
"Mona," Lisa said.
But Mona didn't acknowledge her roommate. She didn't acknowledge any of them. She moved straight ahead, with measured steps, toward the door to Lisa's bedroom and beyond. It was clear to Paula that the woman was definitely in pain; Lisa's ludicrous threat notwithstanding, this was obviously neither the time nor place to talk to Mona about anything.
Tomorrow would be better.
And the day after that.
And every day, from then on.
Until she got what she wanted.
Even barring the regrettable absence of a broken nose, Mona was perfect.
Past the first choked utterance, Lisa found herself completely unable to speak. She had to steady herself against the stove as Mona disappeared from the kitchen and the door slid shut behind.
It's impossible. They were the only words that could form inside her mind. She was terrified, she was overjoyed, she was stunned to the marrow of her bones. She felt like a set of china that had just had the tablecloth ripped magically out from under it without shattering.
But I saw her. The new thought crept in, with a power and a set of images all its own. She could distinctly see the shattered teeth, the misshapen knob of purple flesh and cartilage between the eyes and mouth
, the terrible abundance of dried and still-flowing blood, as the paramedics had borne her best friend's wreckage from the ruin of 411 West Twenty-fourth Street.
She turned to Billy, who was still standing just to the left of the doorway, and was amazed to see Dave standing there, still clutching the floral bouquet. The sight of Billy and Dave together was only slightly less strange than the sight of the reconstituted Mona. It did nothing for her attempts to hinge herself firmly back in reality.
She wondered briefly if this weren't all an extremely perverse dream.
"No," Billy said, as if in answer. "Not a dream. "But I—" she began.
"It looked worse last night than it wound up being," he cut in. "That's all."
"But I—" she tried again, a bit more frenzied.
"Not now," Billy insisted, a chilly trace of smile on his lips. "We've got company. And I guess I'd like to know a little bit about that." He turned a cold gaze toward Paula and Susan. "You here to offer your condolences, or what?"
Lisa turned toward the women, who showed no reaction whatsoever to what he'd thrown. Masters of the unified front, she noted. They wouldn't give him the fucking time of day.
The man who brought the victimized woman home is the enemy, simply because he's a man.
How many layers of bullshit are there between the truth and me, anyway?
Dave had been feeling very much like an outsider throughout it all. That internalized status sense had not changed a whit. But he felt himself being sucked, more and more, into the drama as it unfolded before him.
The women were, doubtless, the feminists that Lisa was affiliated with. They were Movement people, all the way: no-nonsense clothes, no-nonsense hair, no nonsensical makeup whatsoever. They were determined, intelligent, and brittle as day-old bread. All of that was obvious at a glance.
The big surprise was Billy: more succinctly, how much he was finding himself impressed by the guy. This was the loser that Mona had so often described; this was the man whose handshake had precipitated the most profound and hallucinogenic headache of his life. This was the guy who he had been totally prepared to steal Mona away from, if only for her own good.
That opinion was rapidly, if not happily, changing.
Because Billy was dealing with the situation in ways that Dave doubted very seriously he'd be able to match. When he'd first heard about the rape, it was overload-time: too much weirdness, too much panic. Dragging himself downtown, to her apartment, had been—to thine own self be true—one of the most difficult experiences of his life. Short of thrusting his flowers forth, he'd had no idea as to what he would do.
But Billy was on top of it, and that was impressive. And Billy had not been a prick about his presence, which was more impressive still. Billy seemed to have all of the ramifications of the nightmare under control.
Down to the feminists, whose presence seemed entirely suspect, to say the least.
Which was the most impressive thing of all.
"C'mon," Billy was insisting. "From you, silence is bullshit. You're more straightforward than that. Talk to me."
"You couldn't possibly understand," Susan said.
"The impossible is my frame of reference," Billy said. "Why don't you try me."
It wasn't a question. As intensely as the two women were staring him down, Billy was matching them, and more. Dave felt his respect start to border on camaraderie; and he found his composure inching steadily back.
"I know," he said. "You're selling Girl Scout cookies, door to door."
Billy let out a hoot of laughter. Lisa groaned, then shot him a look that said please, don't start. The other two women flared up like safety matches of a barnyard door.
"And what are you here for?" Paula threw back, pointing at the flowers. "Sloppy seconds?"
Dave broke out in a spontaneous, furious sweat. "I'm here because I love her!" he blurted. Billy's eyebrows raised, and the word oops flickered across Dave's mind; but it was too late to worry about, and it was the truth.
"Whereas you two," Billy said, "look like a pair of Army recruiters. And if that's true, then I just gotta say that you've got the worst sense of timing I've ever seen."
"Tacky," Dave agreed. He and Billy exchanged rueful grins.
"That's enough," Lisa said, striding into the middle of the room. "I think you should all leave now."
"But—" Susan began.
"I don't care to discuss it, Susan." Her voice was as steady and cutting as the flame from an acetylene torch. "I don't care to discuss it with anyone, okay? This isn't a political debate. This isn't the fucking Don Rickles Show. The last thing Mona needs right now is to listen to the four of you take potshots at each other. In case you've forgotten, there's a wounded human being in the next room.
"And Mona comes first." She was addressing the women now, Dave could see. It was his guess that Billy had been right about the Army recruiters. "That's the bottom line: Mona comes first. Understood?"
Everybody nodded, though some seemed more apologetic than others. Dave, for his part, felt properly chagrined. He'd come here full of anxiety and concern, only to wind up teasing the dykes. It was stupid. It made him feel petty and small.
"Just one thing," Billy said. "I want Bubba to stay here with you." Lisa looked at him, expressionless. "You can't be here all the time, and he's a good watchdog. He can take care of her, and keep her company. I think she'd like it,"
"Okay." Lisa nodded. There was a shadow of a smile on her troubled face. "And we'll talk later, alright?"
"Absolutely."
"And would you give her these," Dave said, indicating the flowers, "for me?"
"Sure." Lisa smile was nearly halfway to normal as she took the bouquet. "I'm sure she'll like them, too,"
"We ready to go?" Billy said.
"Ready when you are,"
"Okay. Let's go."
Dave had never actually let the door slip shut behind him. He turned, and Billy followed. The words and you girls might want to leave her some pamphlets crossed his mind, and quite wisely decided to stay there.
When the door closed behind them, he wiped the lingering sweat from his forehead and said, "Jesus, that was intense."
Billy nodded solid agreement. "I don't know about you, but I could use a beer."
Dave smiled. "We talking Chelsea Commons?"
"Sounds good to me."
They started down the stairs, together. Dave boggled at the pleasant strangeness of it. There was something absurdly appropriate about having a drink with Billy now: a truce, rendered under the shadow of atrocity.
"Billy," he said, pausing midway down and turning to fix the other man with a penetrating stare. "Is she going to be okay?"
"Yeah," Billy said, smiling melancholy confidence. "I think she's gonna be fine. It's just gonna take a while."
"You're taking care of her." Not a question: an assessment.
"Yes."
"You've probably gathered"—and Dave was stunned by the ease with which the words came out—"that I'm a little bit crazy about her, myself."
"That's okay." Billy put his hand on Dave's shoulder and gently squeezed. "There's no such thing as too much love in the world."
"You're a good guy."
"So are you, man."
"Will you marry me?"
Billy stared, dumbstruck, then laughed. "Good to meet you, Dave. At last."
"Alright!" Dave enthused, offering his hand automatically. Billy took and shook it. "Now let's go get blasted, whaddaya say?"
"Alright!" Billy echoed.
It didn't occur to Dave until much later that his hands, for the first time in days, felt like his own again.
TWENTY-NINE
WAR ROOM
BILLY! read the big angry letters of the note. ALBERT CALLED ME AT THE OFFICE TODAY. HE SAID THINGS THAT WERE NOT NICE. HE THREATENED ME WITH BODILY HARM IF THE FULL $1000 ISN'T IN HIS HANDS BY SIX TOMORROW EVENING.
I WILL JUST BARELY HAVE MY PART OF THE MONEY TOGETHER. I CANNOT AND WILL NOT BAIL YOU OUT A
ND IF YOU DON'T HAVE THE REQUISITE CASH TOGETHER, I WILL RIP YOUR FUCKING EYES OUT WITH MY TEETH.
The note was signed, LOVE, LARRY, and it was hanging squarely in the middle of Billy's bedroom door, where he couldn't possibly miss it when he came home.
PS., it concluded, THE APARTMENT LOOKS GREAT, I'M AMAZED TO SAY. LET'S SEE IF WE CAN KEEP IT.
Billy gave Larry a full sixty seconds of serious thought. Larry came up wanting. Billy was not surprised. Threats from anybody rang kind of hollow these days, and Larry was certainly no exception.
Let he who is without sin . . . the Good Lord's voice began. Again, Larry was a joke in the scheme of things. Diverting flak from the Better Business Bureau was not Billy's idea of the cleanliness next to Godliness.
It was copping a slimeball excuse for not doing what is right.
And that shit couldn't be tolerated.
Anymore.
But there were more immediately important things to dwell on, Billy knew. The covering of debts, for one thing.
Even if the debt was owed to Albert, who hadn't given a righteous shit about anyone but himself since his six-year-old self had discovered the joys of pulling wings off flies.
You did not renege. You did not go back on your word. It was an imperative as basic as breathing.
If you don't have a code . . . he thought, and the thought drove him back to where he'd been before the note had so pleasantly jarred his consciousness. Yes, money was important. Yes, living up to your obligations was important. And that was the bitch.
He had to figure out what his obligations really were.
Billy tore the note off the door, folded it twice, and stuffed it into his pocket. Then he walked into his room and shut the door behind him.
The weighing of his priorities.
And the straightening thereof.
Was about to begin.
There was only one chunk of wall space in the room that was suitable for hanging things on. It was his poster wall, occupying the space between his desk and the doorway. Relics from his past festooned it like barnacles on a long-since-sunken ship.
The Cleanup Page 21