That night, Guido kept saying, Stay low and keep to the trees. Good advice, I thought, watching Scotty pace.
When his face was turned the other way, I moved from the sidewalk and into the oleander hedge. I wanted to see whoever it was that Scotty was waiting for.
The approaching car sped up, passed the bus on the left, the sound of its horn signaling the driver’s impatience. I thought, Here’s a cabbie who’s hot for a tip. Until the car came out ahead of the bus and passed under the streetlight: a white Ford with three inhabitants. Through the car’s back window I could see a thick arm resting along the top of the seat, the white scar writhing as light and shadow played on the unpigmented skin.
A round, pale face appeared over the arm. Eyes shaded with heavy lashes looked directly at me.
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Stay low. The sussurush of the oleander was as soft as a whisper, Guido’s warning so clear in my mind that I heard his words in the wind. Keep to the trees.
Eyelashes leaned forward to speak to the Ford’s driver. I used that moment to slip into the shelter of the oleander.
I lost Scotty. He was there, pacing, and then he was gone. I thought that he was probably hidden from me by the large trees at the end of the drive. I also thought that the men in the car had come to see him, or maybe even to pick him up. And I was appalled.
What a liar Scotty was. His attaché dangled from my hand, a pocket of lies maybe. I thought about holding it open and letting the wind carry the papers away just as he drove past with his buddies. But to do so, I would have to expose myself.
Instead, I moved deeper into the shrubbery.
The bus pulled abreast of the shelter. The doors opened, illuminating the driver like an angel in a department store window at Christmas.
The blonde stepped right into the bus, but the younger waitress, the Hispanic, called out to me. “You coming?”
The driver, a little guy with a pencil mustache, came to the door to look out. “Who’s there?”
“Some woman.” The Hispanic waitress shrugged, held up her bus pass for the driver to see. “She’s hidin’ in the bushes.”
I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t until I knew what Scotty was up to. I showed myself to the driver.
“Leave, please,” I said.
“You sick, lady?”
“Just go.”
He started down the bus steps. “Won’t be another bus along for a half hour. If you’re sick, you might as well come along now.”
“I’m not sick,” I said. “I’m waiting for a cab.”
He shrugged and sat back down. “Cabbie won’t go beatin’ the bushes for a fare. But if you want to be in there gettin’ yourself all wet, who am I to say anything?”
He closed the door and pulled away from the curb, taking his light with him.
Feeling more than a little foolish—so the driver goes back to the barn after his shift and says, Guess what happened to me out by Gabe’s tonight? Some woman …
I slipped deeper into the oleander, farther away from the lights of the parking lot that would pick out my khaki coat from the dark all around. I hoped that the pale pink flowers on the shrubs would cover for anything that showed through the gaps in the hedge. My mom, the family botanist, always warned us to stay away from oleander. The bark, the flowers, and the leaves are all poisonous. At that moment, hunkering down among poison plants seemed a whole lot safer than being in the open.
Through the leaves, I looked for Scotty again on the far side of the drive where I had last seen him. The Ford slowed, turned into the drive, and stopped. The front passenger door opened. The dome light was out, but I could see the pale top of a man’s head as he squatted in that open door. In the dark, and with the wind shifting my view holes through the shrubs, it was difficult to see very much.
I could hear voices. Sometimes they grew loud. The noise of the leaves around me and the wind, the car’s idling motor, made it difficult to hear anything except the occasional word.
The parking lot was ringed by chain-link fence that was disguised by the landscaping. I moved right up to the fence, getting within ten yards of the car, trying to overhear. For maybe a nanosecond, I thought about brazenly walking up and demanding to know what was going on and how Scotty knew these three creeps in the car. Instinct overcame impulse, and I did no more than lurk.
My foot caught on an exposed root and I would have fallen on my face if I hadn’t caught a thin branch. I was knocking mud off my boot when I heard the car door slam. Shafts of light pierced the shrubbery as the Ford made a U-turn and headed back down the drive toward the street. I ducked as the car drove off in the same direction it had come.
I couldn’t see Scotty, and decided that he must have gotten into the car. I waited in hiding until the red taillights disappeared into the night. Then I went back to the bus shelter to retrieve Scotty’s attaché, and the boxed dinner I had set down beside the bench.
The box was cracked, and I could smell the food inside. Hungry, I took a slice of radicchio out and snacked on it while I walked back toward the restaurant to call the cab company again.
Every few steps, I turned to make sure the men weren’t coming back, but I wasn’t overly worried. Puzzled, yes. But not afraid.
A few drops of cold water splashed my cheek. I looked up to see a few stars among the clouds; my dad always told me that when you could see stars, it wouldn’t rain. But I was getting wet. Not rain this time. The automatic sprinklers along both sides of the sidewalk sputtered at first and then burst into a shower, drenching the already soaked plants and the long pale strip of sidewalk.
I dashed through the frigid spray, heading for the closest dry patch, the driveway. Twice again I nearly slipped, first in the slimy mud and then the slick sidewalk. Attaché in one hand, food in the other, I kept my balance like a surfer, and somehow managed to keep my feet under me.
I reached the driveway, water sloshing in my leather boots, freezing my toes. My silk blouse stuck to my skin, the wet tendrils of my hair, blown by the wind, stung my cheeks. I started to shiver. Then, I started to laugh.
All day, I had planned how cool I was going to be, hoping to make Scotty eat his heart out. And here I was, skulking around, caught in the sprinklers, looking probably like a boat-lift refugee.
I shook the oleander from my hair, finger-combed the wet strands behind my ears, and then, way too late, I buttoned up my coat; my wet bra was as transparent as my blouse. I squared my shoulders, and walked back toward the restaurant.
There was a black heap of something dumped between two eucalyptus trees near the curb, lying right next to a spewing sprinkler head. At first, it looked like a golf bag dumped maybe by some fed-up duffer. Odd, I thought, that I hadn’t noticed the shape before. I had looked right there, because that spot was where Scotty had been standing the last time I saw him.
The dark heap rolled to one side.
“Maggie?” The voice, a whisper as soft as the water falling on the grass.
“Scotty?” Wary, half-expecting him to jump up, I edged closer until sprinkler water pecked insistently on my cheeks and ran in my eyes. “Did you trip? Are you hurt?”
Scotty lay on his back over an exposed eucalyptus root, his chest arched upward as if he were being lifted by the carved ivory handle screwed into his breastbone. Thick black tracings coursed down from that handle, soiling his shirt, spilling into the mud beneath him.
I dropped to my knees beside him, shocked, not believing, and raised his head, cradled it against my chest. He was heavy. I had to move him out of the water, but I was afraid that when I did I would make the knife in his chest do more damage. Unable to comprehend the full horror of what I was seeing, I still half-expected him to be playing a malicious joke. And then I met his eyes and I understood, finally, that he was dying.
I gripped him under his arms and dragged him away from the sprinklers. When I had him lying on his back on the sidewalk, I took off my coat and covered him. Wiping water from his face
, I told him, “Scotty, I have to get help.”
He tried to raise his hand to stop me, but could not, and it fell back again onto the sodden concrete. The utter desperation of this gesture held me beside him. We were more intimate at that moment than we had ever been before, adulterers as surely as if we were in bed together.
“I have to get someone,” I said, and began to rise.
His fingers curled, gesturing me closer. “Keep the house.” He sighed, a dark trickle ran from his lips.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Scotty.” I blurted the words, a sort of reflex fueled by overwhelming and scattered emotions: love, hate, fear. This was no time to be thinking about the fucking house.
With effort, he focused his eyes on my face. He said only, “Sorry.”
That’s all, yet it sounded like a deathbed confession, a last attempt to atone for a lifetime of sins. I wanted to say something to offer him gentle passage. “Casey loves you,” I said. And then, not knowing where it came from, I said, “I loved you once.”
I saw men die in Salvador, I have seen youth die on the streets of the city. Death creeps across the face the way a shadow grows with the setting sun, an extinguishing of the light. That look that is like no other was on Scotty’s handsome face.
“Who did this to you?” I demanded. “What do those men want?”
“Hide the babies,” he sighed. “Hide.”
Death also has a sound. The last breath escapes in a rush and then it is as if all the strings that hold a man together just give up on him all at once. All Scotty’s tension, all his anguish, all his future just slipped away with the rush of his last air.
I held Scotty as gently as I would a sleeping baby, finding a delicacy about him in death that I had never seen during his life. He had been a baby once, and someone had held him. For Casey, I wanted him to be handled from this point with dignity.
I pulled my coat up over Scotty’s face and rose to get help. I had run only a few steps when headlights from an approaching car lit the driveway all around me. I turned to face the light, waving my arms to flag down the driver.
The white Ford aimed its front bumper at me and accelerated.
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I ran.
The three men had come back, and it certainly wasn’t to give Scotty a ride home. As soon as I recognized the car, I said a quick Hail Mary just in case, and then I cursed Scotty for whatever he had gotten me into.
My first impulse was to run to the restaurant, but it was way too far away. Instead, I dove back into the shrubbery outside the parking lot fence. Oleander branches slapped my face, leaving tracks of sticky, flowery sweetness with their sting.
Staying low, I ran toward the cross street, praying someone would come along and get me the hell out of there. No one had left the lot for over ten minutes. Wasn’t it about time?
Like a hamster in a Habitrail, I ran along the narrow channel between the nine-foot fence and the oleander that shielded me from the street. The car followed in a parallel line along the curb, a flashlight aimed through a window hitting me now and then.
The three men argued volubly. One of them yelled, “Get out,” a couple of times, but their argument was lost to me among the racket I made forcing my way through dense shrubs.
Disc brakes squealed.
“Hey, lady!” Through gaps in the leaves I saw the man called Dowd jump from the slow-moving car. He aimed a flashlight beam into the brush somewhere behind me. “Give it up, lady. No point both of us gettin’ wore out. All we want to do is talk to you.”
His voice gave me chills just like the mud that sucked under my shoes. I shuddered: I was cold, but I had a flash of his hands, the hands that might have plunged the knife into Scotty’s chest, touching me. The thought made me run faster through the obstacle course of poison oleander, fallen branches, and mud.
“Hey, Dowd, you slut.” The man called Bowles shouted from the driver’s seat. “She’s only one skinny cunt. You ain’t hurt bad. Just grab and let’s go.”
“Fuck you, Arnie.” Dowd didn’t seem to know exactly where I was, even though I thought I was making a lot of noise. Then his light seemed to get a fix on me. He hesitated for a second before he stepped off the sidewalk and onto the muddy strip. His right arm seemed to bother him as he bobbed and wove, looking for me through the foliage.
His light hit my face just as I turned my head, dazzling my eyes for a moment. I couldn’t see the branches that ripped my skirt and tore gashes in the flesh of my legs. I clamped my teeth against the sting and plunged across an open space, hoping to gain some distance. I hadn’t run for a week; I was winded already.
Dowd was fast. He flailed through the brush behind me, his strong legs eating up my small lead.
Suddenly, there was quiet behind me, the instant between breaths. I risked a glance back and saw Dowd airborne, then land facedown in the mud, his sore arm pinned beneath him.
Bowles laughed. “Nice footwork, you dumb fuck.”
“Shut the fuck up!” Dowd roared as he freed his foot from an exposed root as thick as his shin. He came up running, but he was awkward, babying his arm.
I strained to pull air into my aching chest as I ran. Suddenly he was behind me, so close I felt the push of air he displaced around him. He reached for me, but I arched away and then dropped and rolled under a thick bush. Pebbles in the cold mud gouged tracks in my cheek as I belly-crawled away from him.
“Give it up, sweetheart.” The man with the scar called out from the car, calm, amused. He laughed and the arrogance of him infuriated me. “Get the fuck up off the ground, honey. You’ll get mud all over my trunk.”
Dowd’s filthy hand closed around my foot, squeezing until the bones inside my boot ground against each other. It hurt, but no more than the junk that ripped my back as he dragged me into the open.
“You like it rough?” He jumped on top of me, knocking the wind out of me. His muddy, callused hands left patches of heat on my thighs as he groped between my legs.
“Don’t mess the bitch up too much,” Bowles shouted. “We might want some, too.”
I wished I had taken the knife out of Scotty’s chest. I bucked against the weight of Dowd’s body and nearly puked as I felt his erect penis pushing back. Looking for anything, I clawed the mud until my hand closed around a two-foot-long stick. With the most powerful forearm stroke I ever swung, I slammed the stick against Dowd’s sore arm.
He let me go, roaring, “Fucking bitch.”
Released from the hot weight of his body, I started to crawl, then to run away from him.
“Enough fun, Dowd.” Scar was getting out of the car as I found solid footing. “Someone’s coming. Get her into the car. Now.”
Big headlights came up the street: the one-ten bus. I had to get the driver’s attention. My feet skated over the slick ground and I could hardly stay upright as I ran for pavement.
Broken twigs showered me from behind as Dowd lunged again. His feet shot out behind him, but he managed to catch me by the sleeve. The silk tore as I pulled away, but he managed to shift his grip and get hold of my arm, circling it with his big hand. Pissed now, thinking he was screwing up my only chance, I body-slammed that injured side again.
“Bitch.” He kneed my groin and the pain dropped me. I knelt in the muck, nauseous, gasping for air.
A new set of hands snatched me around the middle and dragged me to my feet again like some half-unstuffed toy. Scar grinned into my face, big flat teeth gray in the dim light. I smelled decay behind his breath mints and threw up on his shirt front.
He was not fazed. His fat, feminine hands covered my breasts and squeezed. I had a bad feeling about how this would turn out.
“Hurry up.” Bowles stood in the open car door, nervously watching the bus draw closer.
“We’ll wait,” Scar called back. “Let him go by.”
Scar threw me to the ground and pinned me tight against him. The corrupt smell of his sweaty body bled into the crispness of the eucalyptus,
soiled the clean night air. When I tried to get free of him, he gripped me by the back of the neck and forced my face down.
“You started this, bitch,” he said. “You fucked everything up royal. Now you’re going to pay up.”
The closer the bus came, the tighter the grid of hands that held me. I wanted the bus to slow down, to give me a little more time for inspiration to hit.
The bus was less than six feet from the car’s front bumper. Bowles had ducked down below the window of the open door. All I could see were his legs between the bottom of the door and the curb. Beside me, Dowd and Scar were hardly breathing as they waited for the bus to pass.
There was a quick, short blast from the bus horn, then it veered suddenly toward the curb and with a tremendous explosion of glass and steel, it smacked the car head on, snagging Bowles behind the open door and dragging him thirty feet down the asphalt. Stunned, exultant, I watched Bowles’s heels bounce along the pavement like Howdy-Doody performing a weird, drunken dance.
Dowd did a dance of his own beside me. My neck hurt; his hands, like pliers, shook me. I tried to break free before he broke something. Then I realized that Scar, drawn away from me to the crash like a dog offered a better treat, had let go of me.
The bus backed up, grinding wreckage under its enormous wheels. As Scar watched to see what would happen, I saw fascinated pleasure spread across his face. The bus gears ground and then it started forward again, back toward the smashed front of the car. I heard Bowles, a dark heap next to the car, moan.
“Do something.” There was tearful desperation in Dowd’s plea.
But Scar held out his hand. “Wait.”
“Wait? Shit! That’s my best man. I gotta get him.”
Scar wasn’t listening. He was busy measuring the distance between the bus and the car with his eyes. His face was orgasmic and I could almost see him calculate the angle of bounce Bowles would make if the bus hit him again. When his hand dropped to his crotch, I saw my opening.
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