Bad Intent

by Wendy Hornsby

  Someone yelled, “Speech,” and I finally realized that this was an accolade because of the news broadcast. As the vanquisher of a common enemy, I made a deep bow. Then I climbed down and went over to Mike.

  Through the din, I yelled, “Who’s your friend?”

  “Olga,” he beamed, and patted the arm wrapped around his middle. “Olga, meet the love of my life.”

  Olga hissed.

  Hector was at my elbow. I smelled beer on him and his eyes had the same dreamy glaze that Mike’s had.

  “It was great what you did, Maggie.” Hector pulled me into an embrace and planted a sloppy kiss on me. He was weaving. I knew that if I let go of him he would fall on his face.

  I caught a glimpse of Mike watching us. His eyes had cleared. Actually, they flashed. Elaborately, I paid no attention to him, or to the female attached to him. He reached through the mob to put a hand on Hector’s shoulder.

  Gazing up into Hector’s face, I said, “What’s with Mike? He looks cranky.”

  “I don’t know what it is. Ever since I fucked Charlene we haven’t been really close.”

  That was the first time in my life I wished I was as drunk as everyone else.

  “He doesn’t blame me,” Hector was saying. “Not like it’s my fault. She came on to me. She’s so-o beautiful, what’s a poor sucker to do?”

  I disentangled myself and propped Hector on the broad shoulders next to us. Mike was weaving some himself. Olga seemed to be getting mad that she had lost his attention. When I smiled at her she mouthed, “Bitch.” To Mike she snapped, “You said you wasn’t married,” and flounced off to try her luck elsewhere.

  When Mike listed precariously to the left, I righted him. I said, “Ready to go home?”

  “That was one hell of a piece of work you did.” His words slurred. “We watched it three times. Three times all the way through.”

  “Good thing it only lasted a minute,” I said, taking his arm. “You smell like una noche de amor, amigo. Let’s go get you cleaned up.”

  He draped an arm around my shoulders and let me forge the path of least resistance through the standing crowd. Besides beer and cigarette smoke and sweet young thing, he smelled like a hard day’s work. I liked it.

  The fresh air outside made him reel. I hadn’t a clue where his car might be, so we headed toward mine. I said, “If you’re going to throw up, I’d rather you do it here than in my car.”

  “Me?” Shocked offense. “You think I’m drunk?”

  “I hope you are,” I said.

  “You’re pissed about Olga.”

  “No.”

  “Damn.” He seemed dejected. “It would be easier if you were pissed. Go ahead and yell at me. I’ll feel better.”

  “What’s the point? You’re so drunk, in the morning you won’t remember anything I said. Like yelling at an amnesiac. Why waste the effort?”

  We passed a new set of lovers in the dry cleaner’s doorway. He said, “How can I make it up to you?”

  “Make love to me right here, right now.”

  His step faltered as he thought over the proposition. Then he stopped, appealed to me with tears in his eyes. “Sorry, baby. I don’t think I can.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  I woke up early Saturday morning, sorted my arms and legs from Mike’s, and took the cotton out of my ears—he’s a ferocious snorer when he drinks. The air conditioner had been set too low and I felt a little chilled. The chill disinclined me from swimming laps, so I slipped into running things and headed down the hill toward Ventura Boulevard.

  Some fog had drifted into the Valley, a cool, moist, gray in- fusion into the rising heat. For the first mile, I ran stiff and heavy-footed. But I found my stride at about mile two and ran easily among the residential streets north of the boulevard, falling into place among the mass of weekend runners.

  Because I didn’t know the area, hadn’t clocked the streets, I couldn’t set a distance goal. Instead, I timed myself. If I didn’t get lost, I figured to arrive home at just about the same time the coffee was set to be ready.

  I didn’t push myself, so I beat both the paper boy and Mr. Espresso by about two minutes. I was listening to telephone messages from the day before when I heard the paper thunk against the garage door.

  I paused the answering machine, bored with it. In one way or another, every caller had offered me something: a job, an interview, sudden painful death. I had been through it all before and wanted none of it.

  It was nice to have the house to myself for a while. Even Bowser was gone—Mike left him locked happily into the yard at the South Pasadena house, with food and water, he promised. I traded my hot running shoes for the ratty moccasins Mike keeps by the back door and slogged out for the paper.

  Maggie MacGowen had made page one, part one, column right. I spread the paper open on the kitchen table and glanced at the lead paragraph while I heated some milk with the little steam chingow on the espresso maker, made myself a big cup of caf6 au lait. When I sat down, I was ready to concentrate.

  The “dark and stormy night” school of journalism is very tiresome. I wanted straight news. What I got was a clumsy metaphor using the heated-up weather to define the heated up D.A.‘s race, and then Maggie MacGowen came and threw a cold bucket on the leader, Baron Marovich. I managed to sort out the essentials.

  Reached in his downtown office late last night, according to the reporter, Marovich denied every allegation of creating a reverse Willie Horton in order to get attention for his campaign.

  He labeled me an example of media gone amok, a dangerous propagandist and dirty-trickster, tried to tuck me into his opponent’s camp. I had to read ahead to get his opponent’s name, because it had slipped my memory.

  The story continued on page twenty-three, half a column giving a, synopsis of Marovich’s campaign history and some of the unfair-campaign-practices charges filed against him over the years.

  Overall, the coverage was okay—I knew it would send Marovich into the stratosphere—but the best part was a little sidebar, a short, related bit of information set off within an attractive gray border. The headline was: “When Career Criminals Go Free.” The story gave details of a few of the more horrific crimes committed by convicts after they were released from prison on legal technicalities. Charles Conklin was not mentioned anywhere in the sidebar.

  I called Guido, woke him up, gloated with him about the story. He was happy, though I thought he wasn’t as chatty as usual. He didn’t prolong the conversation beyond the essentials. I also thought I heard someone else in his bedroom.

  There were some muffins in the freezer. I put one in the microwave, made a second cup of coffee with milk, and was halfway through it when Mike made his stumbling entrance.

  By the time we got home the night before, Mike had been at the point of crashing. It had been difficult enough to get him from the car and into the bed. Beyond taking off his belt and shoes, I hadn’t bothered wrestling off his clothes. Still wearing his dirty work clothes, unshaven for the second day, face puffy, eyes red-rimmed, he was a charming sight.

  He shuffled the last few steps to the kitchen table, aimed a shaky hand, and grasped my coffee cup. After he finished it in one long swallow, he shuddered. Then he looked at me.

  “Wha’ happen?” he said.

  “Olga,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah.” He sat down and raised the empty cup to me for a refill. “Have mercy. I haven’t had that much to drink in years. Never again,” he moaned. “I’m too old.”

  “It happens to us all, big guy.”

  “How come you’re not mad?” He frowned at me. “Don’t you love me?”

  “It’s not your fault women keep falling into your lap. I understand the attraction.”

  “Uh huh.” He looked at me askance, suspicious.

  “Hector explained all that to me last night. A woman offers herself, what’s a poor sucker to do?”

  “Oh my God.” He had color in his grizzled cheeks again. “He to
ld you about Charlene?”

  “Not in detail. She threw herself at him. He’s a gentleman, he had to catch her. Is that how it went?”

  “More or less. She was pissed at me for taking Michael’s scout troop camping when she had some kind of gallery opening. Old Hector didn’t know what hit him.”

  “You didn’t hit him?”

  “Nah.” The tough guy was making a comeback. “Like you said, it wasn’t his fault.”

  I slid the paper in front of him. “Our story made the front page.”

  He looked at it dumbly, eyes not working in concert. “I need my glasses. Read it to me.”

  “It’ll keep,” I said. “Are you hungry?”

  “I’m getting there.”

  I poured him about half a quart of juice and started frying eggs. Normally, Mike takes great care of himself, runs, watches what he eats. But that morning he was completely out of the loop. He ate four eggs, hashbrowns, a stack of toast, and a whole grapefruit. I don’t know where he put it, but it seemed to start the juices flowing again. When he finally crossed his fork and his knife on the edge of his plate, he looked like a potential survivor.

  “So,” he said, leaning back in his chair, rubbing his chest, smiling up at me. “What’s the plan today?”

  “The plan is no plan. I’ve hardly seen you all week. Can we just hang together for a while? You know, like a date?”

  “Sounds good.”

  “I’m going to take a shower.” I dumped my coffee dregs into the sink. “Would you do one favor for me? Would you listen to the phone messages and see what you think about them?”

  “What I think about them?”

  “Couple of them sound like serious death threats.”

  Chapter 25

  “It was after the Watts Festival one year, maybe the first year they held it, I don’t remember. Twenty years ago I guess.” Mike picked up a big plumber’s wrench from the shelf and set it in our shopping cart. We were cruising a hardware warehouse for a few essentials, some elbow joints, socket plates, a lot of spackle; our date. “Anyway, all of us who worked the festival—police and sheriffs—we went down to this vacant lot afterward, street dead-ended at the Artesia Freeway. They were still building the freeway so there was no one around, just a lot of dirt. Used to be a nice neighborhood, till the freeway took it out.

  “So, we got some cases of beer and went down there, built a fire, starting unwinding. Pretty soon the girls started coming. I don’t know who put the word out, but you never saw so many girls.”

  “Women,” I said.

  “Girls,” he said, sorting through a bin of spackle blades. “It’s my story, so they’re girls.”

  “Pig,” I said.

  “Exactly. Back then, we were pigs, they were girls. You gotta know the language of the times or you’re not going to get this story at all.”

  “I’ll try to keep up.” I was pushing the cart. The story was hard to listen to, more truth about Mike than I really needed at the moment. That’s exactly why he was telling it, a sort of test to see where I drew my line, how much truth I would take in before I stopped loving him. I had tried to change the subject a couple of times, but he always came back to the ugly day in the cul-de-sac.

  “People were doing the dirty deed all over the place. Everywhere you looked, naked bodies.”

  “What were you doing?” I asked.

  “Just hanging. My partner got lucky on the hood of our car. I was sitting inside watching his little white ass pumping against the windshield in front of my face. Just pump, pump, pump. Funniest thing you ever saw.”

  “And you just sat there?”

  “Yeah.” He handed me a brown paper drop cloth. “So, I’m sitting there and this girl comes up to me and she says, ‘I’ll do you right here. Anything you want, but I won’t take it in the ass.’ “

  “And did she?” I felt squeamish hearing all this, squeamish the way I felt when batons and fists entered his stories. We had moved a long way from the Olgas always trying to sit on his lap to where this conversation began.

  “No,” Mike said, looking at the shelves. “She told me she’d already done ten guys by mouth. That really did it for me. I didn’t want her breathing the same air as me.”

  “She did this for pay?”

  “Nope. Just for the fun of it.”

  “Was she pretty?”

  “Not bad.”

  While Mike was busy with wood putty, I walked away from him, pushed the cart over a few aisles to the cupboard knobs display because I didn’t want to get into something with him. All day there had been an edge.

  Mike and I argue back and forth all the time—cop, Berkeley liberal; natural foes. It’s usually a lot of fun. We both posture and exaggerate our opinions just to jerk the other’s chain. This story disturbed me. Especially the just-for-fun part.

  Mike came up behind me. “Find something?”

  “No.” I bent down to look at the knobs in the bottom row because I didn’t want to look at Mike. I heard him take a big breath.

  “It was a long time ago, Maggie. Things were different then.”

  “Did I say anything?”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  I straightened up and turned to face him. “I love your stories. You know I do. This one’s hard to take.”

  “I’ll watch what I say.”

  “Don’t do that. I would be bereft if you thought you had to censor yourself for me. It’s just, that girl gives me chills. I need to think about it a minute.”

  “Bereft, huh? If that story bothers you, you’d never make it on the streets.”

  “Sure I would. It’s not the story—I went to college, I saw my share of naked people doing it—it’s your perspective. She wasn’t a girl, for chrissake Mike, she was a human with a big problem.”

  “Is this a male-female thing?”

  “Not really. It’s more a cop-civilian thing. I think this one belongs in the excessive-shit pile with the fat hooker, Queen Esther, you wrestled to the ground and sat on, and that guy Philip you gave a head full of dummy bumps for resisting arrest. Good stories, but I have trouble putting you in the picture with them.”

  He closed up on me the way he does when he feels defensive, shut me right out. I hated it. He bent down and looked at the knobs in the bottom row because he couldn’t look at me.

  I said, “Find something?”

  “No.”

  I sat down on the floor cross-legged beside him and looked at the ranks of cupboard knobs, from Shaker-plain to rococo. “I like the white china ones. Very simple.”

  He said, “Too simple.”

  “We don’t need any knobs,” I said. “You know what we need?”

  “Pulls?”

  “Lunch.”

  He gave me a sidelong, narrow-eyed glance, still defensive. “We need lunch,” I repeated. “And then we need a nap. What do you think?”

  “We should go by the house and see how the guys are doing with the painting.”

  “Lunch first,” I said, and stroked the underside of his chin, where the muscles were set and hard. “Then a nap.”

  “Where do you want to eat?”

  “At home. I want to eat at home. You and me, like a date, remember?”

  First thing I did when we got home was take the telephone off the hook. I didn’t listen to any messages, and I didn’t pick up the mail. We made sandwiches and carried them into the bedroom to watch the first game of the Dodger double-header while we ate. He was very sweet, very attentive. Very polite, like with someone he didn’t know very well.

  Propped up on pillows, we had a little party, got potato chip crumbs everywhere, argued about was the runner out on second or not, should LaSorda retire, and who was going to win the division. He began to relax with me again. And I relaxed. I was out before the seventh inning stretch, sleeping with my face against Mike’s tummy, his arm draped across me.

  I woke up once, came to enough to notice that the television was off and Mike was asleep beside me. The s
econd time I awoke, the sun was low in the sky and I was alone. I got up, groggy, and went out looking for Mike.

  Mike wasn’t in the house, nor had he left a note. The telephone ringer was off, the message tape had been erased, the mail had been sorted. In my pile there were only a picture postcard from my parents—they were on vacation in the East—a reminder from Casey’s orthodontist, and a check from the tenants in my San Francisco house. I stuck the card on the refrigerator with a magnet.

  I called security at my office building and asked whether an envelope had been left for me. The man who answered said there were several envelopes in my mailbox. He was holding a telegram and a big bouquet of flowers—he’d tried to call but couldn’t get through. I had him read me the card on the flowers.

  “Congratulations, Ralph and the staff at SNN.”

  “Keep the flowers,” I told the guard. “Give them to your wife if you have one.”

  I thanked him. Then I went in and took a shower to wake up.

  Just for a change, because I probably had not worn a dress for at least a month, I slipped into a flowery sundress I had bought for a friend’s outdoor wedding in June. Feeling vampish, I also put on some mascara and blush, went into Casey’s bathroom and borrowed some eye shadow. When I had finished, I was a vision. Home alone, but a vision.

  I missed Mike.

  I waited around for about half an hour, puttering. I felt so restless, though, that I traded my three-inch pumps for sandals and went out for a walk through the condo grounds. Waiting around is hard for me.

  I was sitting by the pool in the long, deep shade of early evening, chatting with a neighbor couple, when I saw Mike’s Blazer come up the drive. I excused myself and ran down the sloping lawn to catch him, my skirt billowing around my legs, light and cool. When Mike saw me, he stopped in the middle of the street to wait.