Black Heat

by Ruby Laska

  "That's so intriguing! How funny—I think that would have made me all that more determined to find it."

  "I know. That's what happened." Roan smiled. "It got so Mama knew exactly where to find me, because I'd pretend to clean in here even when all the other rooms were still dirty."

  "Listen, sweetie, I need to pop into the ladies' room," Regina said, standing. "And by 'ladies' room,' of course I mean the tiny bathroom I have to share with two disgusting men. A word to the wise, if you need to visit the powder room tonight I would use Jayne and Matthew's—at least Matthew knows how to use a toilet brush. See you in the madhouse?" She tilted her head toward the kitchen, from which delicious smells and raucous singing were drifting.

  Roan was about to follow Regina out of the room when she noticed one book on the ledge that wasn't like the others: old and frayed, it had a soft leather cover and dog-eared pages.

  She waited until she heard the bathroom door close. Then she picked up the book, carefully noting where it had been placed so she could put it back in exactly the same spot. Her heart beat faster: she was spying on Cal, there was no other word for it.

  A sheaf of papers fell out of the book. She flipped the pages, seeing row after row of neat, painstaking handwriting in blue and black ink. She scanned the dates above the entries and calculated that Cal would have been a teenager when he wrote in the journal. She read a few phrases: "get so God damn angry sometimes"..."looks at me like I'm nothing"...

  She snapped the book closed. This was too private. She had not been invited here, into Calvin's private thoughts, his history. For a moment she felt the leather warming under her hands, and then she peeked at the front page. In a beautiful florid script was written "For Calvin, Happy Birthday, Love, Grandma."

  Regina was setting the book back on the ledge when she remembered the loose papers, and picked them up off the floor. They were brittle with age, and she unfolded them carefully.

  It took her a few minutes to understand what they were: arrest records, summons to appear in court, probation documents. All with Cal's name on them. Over and over, the incriminating words: vandalism, petty theft, simple assault.

  Quickly, Roan refolded the sheets and placed them between the pages of the diary. Her heart was pounding. For a moment she wondered if the pages were some sort of a joke, a complicated practical joke that some friend of Cal's had played on him...but there was no way anyone would be able to produce such detailed fake documents.

  She hurried out of the room carrying her glass and the now-empty cocktail pitcher, her heart in her throat, feeling dizzy. She shouldn't have had so much to drink. Or maybe she should have had even more. Enough to dull her emotions, so that it wouldn't be such a shock to learn that the man she thought she was falling in love with could never be hers. That the man who'd held her, walked Angel for her, rescued her from disaster, was not who she thought he'd been.

  After all, there was a perfectly good reason he hadn't minded lying to help her get away, why he'd covered for her afterward.

  Calvin Dixon could not be her hero, for the simple reason that he was even more damaged than she was.

  #

  "You better sit down, son."

  Chief Byrd had been headed out the door, on his way home to the family Cal imagined was waiting for him: a pretty wife, a couple teenagers, a hot dinner and some much-deserved relaxation in front of the TV.

  Byrd had taken one look at Cal, who had been trying to talk the night desk sergeant into a moment of the chief's time, and taken off the coat he'd just put on.

  Cal sat down in the spare chair in the chief's office as Byrd hung his coat back up. He looked Cal over carefully, raised one eyebrow at his sodden, dirty clothes, and opened his desk drawer. He reached in and came up with a dusty bottle, which he held up to the light.

  "Fifteen-year-old Laphroaig," he said. "This was a gift from the chief before me, when I came on the job. He told me to bring it out when a man needed a reminder that he was one of the good guys. I've only opened this bottle twice before, and—I'll tell you what, Abe Lawrence was as wise as hell."

  "You better save it then, Chief," Cal muttered. "You're not going to think I'm one of the good guys when I'm done."

  The chief sat down slowly, wincing as if some old injury was bothering him. He reached in the drawer a second time and added a couple of shot glasses to the desk. Then he sat back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest, and regarded Cal frankly.

  "You're wet through and through, son," he said. "And you'll pardon me for saying so, but that handsome face of yours isn't winning any awards tonight. You look like you haven't been eating and you haven't got on your knees lately to thank the good Lord for getting you this far. No, hold on now," he said, holding up a hand when Cal started to object. "I haven't started judging yet. You'll know when I do. Just calling it like I see it."

  "Yes sir," Cal said. He was dripping water on the chief's floor, and he wished he had a towel to mop up the mess. He felt cold and clammy all over. A change of clothes would have been a smart thing to pack. But this wasn't exactly Cal's smartest moment.

  "You came in here a few months ago and asked me for a chance to earn a place in my department," Byrd said. "You had to know I would have called the boys where you came from." It wasn't a question, and Cal didn't answer, but yes, he'd known that Chief Byrd would have called the Red Fork Police Department to check for references. He would have gotten an earful, too, along with the faxed record containing all of Cal's juvenile arrests and complaints. He had hoped that the Red Fork chief would have, in the interest of fairness, also sent along Cal's academy records, the ones that put him at the top of his class.

  Byrd opened the bottle and took a sniff of the amber liquid. The scent traveled to Cal. Hard stuff, for a hard man.

  "Chief Lake told me not to waste my time on you," the chief continued. Cal tried not to react, but it was a gut punch all the same. "He said a bad seed grows up into a stunted tree every time. I said maybe I saw it different. He said he guessed we'd get our answer down the line. Asked me if I wanted to wager on it."

  Cal tasted metal in his mouth: the old, familiar taste of shame. Coming here had been a mistake. He deserved this, but he wasn't sure he could handle it. Already he felt heavy, glued to the chair, unable to defend himself.

  Byrd poured two shots, filling the glasses nearly to the top. He pushed one across the desk, picked up the other one and took a sip. He licked his lips and nodded, and Cal took a tentative sip of his.

  It burned. He drank deeper.

  When the chief spoke again his voice was quiet...and hard as steel. "I told your boy Lake that I don't bet on a man's failure."

  He downed the rest of his drink in one swallow, and set the glass down with force.

  "So I'll tell you what, Calvin Dixon," he muttered, all traces of humor and kindness gone from his voice now. "I don't know what made you walk into that house and spring that young woman. I don't know why you're here in my office tonight, though I have a pretty good idea. But I don't care. Here's what's going to happen. You're going to thank me for that drink, and then you're going to get up and get home the same way you got here, which by looking at you seems like it might have been on your own two feet. Anything you were fixing to do on the way—any bars you might have been planning to walk into, any fights you were planning to start—you're not doing that, son. Not in my town and not on my watch. You go home and you go to bed. Tomorrow you wake up and you find that girl and you fix whatever needs fixing. I don't want to hear her name on my radio or read it on any court docket. You work your ass off and you come in here and you take my test and you give me a reason to call that smug son of a bitch down in that one-horse town where you came from and tell him what I think of him. You got me, son?"

  Cal met the gaze of the man who had just given him a speech he never expected to hear. He lifted the glass of amber liquid to his lips and drained it, then set the glass down so gently it barely made a sound on the scarred old wooden desk.r />
  Another chance. For some reason, every time Cal tried to sabotage his own life, he kept getting handed another chance. But this one seemed different. This was the one that mattered.

  "Yes, sir," he said with feeling. "I'll make you proud," he added, as he stood up and left the chief's office, although that was the answer to a question that no one had ever asked.

  #

  It took a fraction as long to get home as it did to walk to the police station, but that was because Meribeth Hillyard happened to see Cal walking past her house in the snow and came out to ask if he could please come in and get her pilot light restarted.

  "You're that nice boy who lives out there with Matthew," she said, beaming. Meribeth was a checker at the Freshway, and she had developed quite a fondness for the man who came in and bought four pounds of bacon and half a dozen gallons of milk at a time, not to mention feminine products for his girlfriend.

  By the time Cal had gotten the stove's pilot cleaned out and re-lit, Meribeth had fixed a plate of applesauce cake and warmed up her old Dodge Caravan, and insisted on driving him home. She dropped him at the end of the road because the dirt path had gotten icy and she didn't want to risk getting stuck. "Say hello to all your nice friends!” Meribeth called, making Cal feel like he'd been dropped off at a fourth-grade play date.

  That feeling was quickly dispelled when he walked in the door and heard a familiar soft, throaty voice coming from inside the house.

  Roan was here. But how? Why?

  He hurried to the kitchen where, from the looks of it, dinner had been over for a while. Matthew was still wearing his apron, and the dishes had been cleared and stacked. But everyone was still sitting at the table covered with pitchers of cocktails and bottles of wine, platters of cookies and what looked like a dismantled engine spread out on the tablecloth.

  Everyone turned to look at him, and a cheer went up. "He's back!" Zane said. "Good, man, because they're kicking my ass at Sprocket Shot."

  "We saved you a seat," Regina said, winking at him and scooting out of the chair next to Roan's, so she could sit next to Chase. She patted the chair she had vacated. "Come on, sit. Maybe Matthew will fix you a plate."

  "Sure thing," Matthew said. "I've been keeping it in the oven."

  As he rattled around the kitchen, Cal looked at Roan. She wouldn't meet his eyes. There were bright spots of pink on her cheeks. She'd let her hair out of its ponytail and it half-covered her face, those long wild curls creating a curtain she was hiding behind.

  She wasn't smiling.

  "What's Sprocket Shot?" Cal asked carefully, going around the table. As he sat, Matthew put a steaming plate of enchiladas in front of him and slammed down an icy beer. The food smelled delicious, but Cal was pretty sure he wouldn't be able to eat.

  "It's Jimmy's latest invention," Zane said. He flipped a little metal piece and sent a bolt flying through the air.

  "It's kind of a cross between tiddlywinks and tic-tac-toe, with heavy machinery," Jimmy admitted. "I was bored at break the other day so I took apart the draw-works drum sprocket and figured out how to re-thread it, and I replaced all these parts. I've already won a hundred and forty thousand dollars off the guys at work."

  Everyone laughed. "I'm surprised they haven't kicked your ass after the mud pump incident," Zane said.

  "What was that?" Regina asked, glancing at Cal. He could tell she was watching him, trying to gauge his mood—and Roan's. Figured she would be trying to take the pulse of their relationship. "Roan and I weren't here, so you guys can't say things like that without explaining."

  As Jimmy launched into some complicated explanation of an invention that had gone wrong, leaving the crew restroom unusable for an entire afternoon, Cal turned to Roan. "Hey," he said softly, touching her arm.

  She pulled her arm away, her lip wobbling as if she might cry.

  "Is everything okay? Are you okay?" he tried, but didn't get any response from those questions. "Roan?"

  Her gaze darted at him, fleeting and deeply unhappy. "I need to go home," she whispered.

  "Are you sick? Don't you feel well?" He was already pushing his chair back from the table, offering her his hand. She ignored it, and stood on her own, abruptly and stiffly.

  All conversation stopped at the table. "Um, everything okay, guys?" Matthew said, returning with a plate full of cornbread. He looked from one face to the next before setting the plate uncertainly down in front of Cal.

  "We're just going to get going," Cal said, as if he hadn't just arrived, as if Roan didn't look like she wanted to bolt. As if they were going to go down to his room and make out, which was actually how he had been hoping the evening might end.

  Regina jumped up, disentangling her hand from Chase's. "Roan, I'm here through the weekend. I have to do a little work but I've got lots of time for coffee or lunch or a walk or...or anything you feel like. Call me?"

  Roan shot her a look that was a hell of a lot warmer than the way she was looking at Cal. "Okay," she said quietly. "Thanks for dinner. Everything was delicious."

  Then she practically ran out of the kitchen toward the front door.

  "What did you say to her, man?" Zane said accusingly.

  Cal didn't answer—didn't even try.

  #

  Roan didn't say a word the first ten minutes of the drive, and then—when they were only blocks from her house, she blurted out, "I saw your diary."

  Cal's hands stiffened on the steering wheel. He didn't say anything for a moment, but took his foot off the gas and let the truck coast to a stop at the curb.

  "You read my diary," he repeated. Well, that would explain things.

  "I didn't read it. I read the papers, though. The arrest record and the court documents."

  "How did you end up in my room? Because that's where the diary was. In my room."

  He felt both angry and bewildered. It had never occurred to him to hide the old journal, because he had never expected anyone to go through his things.

  Only...that wasn't really true, was it? They borrowed each other's things all the time: clean clothes when they ran out, aspirin and phone chargers and anything else they needed.

  Cal had left the book out knowing that one day the guys might come across the incriminating papers. Deep down, he had almost wanted them to. Because then, finally, they could all stop trying so hard to pretend it had never happened.

  Whenever talk turned to their days in high school, someone would eventually remember and glance over at him and suddenly stop talking, and things would get really uncomfortable until someone managed to change the subject. Cal had been a screw-up, but after all this time he was tired of apologizing for it. He could barely remember even being that guy, and he was ready for the truth to come out.

  Except not to Roan.

  He'd loved the way she looked at him, that first night: like a hero, a savior. Like someone good.

  Now she knew different.

  "Roan, I—"

  "You don't owe me any explanations," she said hurriedly. "I mean, wait. Yes. Yes, you did. Before you slept with me."

  She twisted in the seat so that she was staring straight at him. "Before you kissed me. What were you thinking? You came and got me when Jimmy locked me up like—like someone out of the movies, like a hero. You made me believe in you."

  He felt like he'd been slapped. "None of that was a lie, Roan. That was all real. I wanted to help you."

  "What would you have done if we didn't get away? Hit someone? Jimmy maybe? Run from the cops?"

  "Roan, I—that was a long time ago," Cal stammered. He didn't know how to defend himself because he didn't understand what was making her so angry. "I got in trouble a lot when I was a kid. I didn't mean to hide that from you."

  "Is that why you came here?" she demanded, making no effort to stop the tears now. "To North Dakota? Because you couldn't stay in Arkansas? Is there—was there some sort of warrant out for you?"

  "For God's sake! The last time I had any trouble was over a dec
ade ago, Roan. I've been head down, working, ever since I got out of high school."

  "You didn't get out of high school," she muttered. "You didn't graduate. I saw your GED."

  Cal made a hopeless gesture with his hand. "You're right. I'm sorry, was I supposed to tell you that on our first date? 'Oh, something you might want to know about me, I dropped out of school when the entire science department refused to have me in their class'?"

  "What date?" Roan demanded. "You mean the night you caught me breaking and entering?"

  Cal slammed the steering wheel with his hand. "What do you want me to say here, Roan? Okay, I wish I'd met you some other way. I wish I'd walked into Walt's to buy an inner tube and asked you out. I wish I'd spent the last ten years being a pilot or a doctor or whatever it would take to impress you, and that before that I'd been part of a perfect family, a football hero and the class valedictorian. But I can't. I thought you were okay with that. I thought—"

  He'd thought she liked him. For who he was. Despite everything. Maybe, even, because of everything.

  He thought she might understand. Because maybe she was just a little bit like him herself.

  Cal jammed the truck back into gear and started forward, window wipers working against the drizzle, roads slick with ice.

  "I can't be with you," Roan said so quietly he wasn't sure he had heard. "You think we're the same, because of what I did at the house, and because of the way I treat Mimi. But we're not the same. I'm not like you. I had a family. I was happy. I had everything and—and—and I just need to get it back."

  "You're right," Cal said. Inside, he felt like something was breaking in half, something that could never be put right again. "We aren't the same. I did enough wrong in my first eighteen years to last a lifetime. In fact it'll probably take the rest of my life for me to make it up, and even then my grandmother will have died without ever knowing I got my life together. But at least I'm trying. I'm trying, Roan. Don't you see that? I'm working my ass off every day to deserve what I have and maybe, just maybe, to deserve someone like you. And meanwhile, what are you doing? Sitting around feeling sorry for yourself. Working in a bike shop when you know you want more from your life. Your best friend is a dog. You can't even see what's right in front of your face—you think you don't have any family when Mimi's just dying to get back into your life."