They had him all along. He was theirs the whole time.
He kicked at a chair, sending it clattering against the wall.
Torres waited till it tipped over and lay still. “You want to know why,” he said.
“I want to know, why me?”
“We needed someone to be there. Understand? To see it. We only have bits and pieces. I won’t lie to you. The Rooster Lair is bugged, but the Callum house and Wayne’s are not. We couldn’t have them all. Legal minefield. You have to pick your battles.”
“I’m a battle. That’s what you’re saying.”
“In a way, yes. This actually protects you, you know. No one can say you were an accomplice to any of this.”
Was this a threat? Greg didn’t especially give a shit at the moment. “An informant being a witness, you mean. Something you can actually use in court.”
“Now you are surmising. So just hold on, and sit down.”
“No.”
“Don’t be this way. Think about it. We were able to pull off the Rooster Lair tonight. Because of that, I was able to show you what we’re dealing with. What you’re dealing with.”
“You realize I’m fucking him over again,” Greg shouted. “You do realize that. What he’ll do.”
“Wait. What do you mean, again?” Torres said.
As soon as Greg shouted it he knew it was unsafe, a slip from the past, a safe pried open by rage. Reason reanimated in his brain, to fix it. “I mean, is this even legal?” he went on, throwing it back at Torres. “Oh, they’d just love this back there at that crazy-ass secession powwow, fits right in with their batshit conspiracy theories, their one world order circle jerk-offs.”
He stepped over to the wall and its shadows to hide whatever might be showing on his face.
“Hold on right there,” Torres said. “First thing? You need to quit seeing them as bush-league amateurs. Do that, you underestimate them. They’re crafty. Will not give up. Eventually, it all leads right back to Oklahoma City, to our preventing something like that.”
“You mean Wayne. That’s who we’re really talking about.”
“I mean whoever’s in a position to be charged responsible for this.”
Greg wandered off to a corner, deep in thought. At first, he wanted to deflect Torres from his and Donny’s true relationship, from their secret. But there was more to this. He had seen the clues. He had been holding it in his hand and staring at it—and on and off for years, really.
He walked over to Torres. “I’m just thinking here. How did you really know about Donny and me being friends? It wasn’t some database. No one knew about us much. I didn’t want too many people knowing I was hanging out with some goofy cowboy kid from the sticks.”
Torres made his face blank, blanker than some poker player. He could’ve been dead. He was good. Maybe he’d once been a Marine guarding embassies, Greg thought.
Torres held the stare.
“Stall all you want,” Greg said. “I’ll keep asking. She is Gunnar’s mother, isn’t she?”
Torres kept the mask on. “Who?”
“You know who: Leeann Holt. Used to be Donny’s girl.”
Torres didn’t shake his head.
“Where is she?” Greg said.
Torres straightened up with his shoulders level, equidistant from Greg’s, forming a perfect square between them. “I can’t tell you that. Confidentiality issue.”
“Hers or yours?”
“Both. It’s the rules. My rules.”
Greg made for the door.
“Wait—where you going?” Torres said.
Greg opened the door, stepped out.
“Just, wait,” Torres said, but softer.
Greg stopped in the doorway. “Where is she? Just tell me where she is.”
“You can’t go. Not now.”
“I have to. I have to get away from this.”
Torres told him. “You go, you have to come right back,” he added.
“I don’t have to do anything,” Greg said, closed the front door behind him and made for his car.
29
Greg drove right through the night. Torres had let him drive off. Torres had let him leave town. Greg didn’t want to think about how easy it had been. Too easy. Just like it had been coming here in the first place. Then again, what could Torres do about it, really? Arrest him?
Greg drove without stopping, right over the mountains. He had so much in his head. He thought about Gunnar, about timing, and the last time he and Leeann had been together. They had gone to a park, for a picnic of their own under a shady tree. He had dumped her in the last place she expected, in a safe place. What was he thinking? Who the hell did he think he was? She should have at least slapped him before she ran off.
Before dawn, he ended up on a street in an older neighborhood on the east side of Portland, close to 82nd Avenue and that solitary hill called Rocky Butte. He was nodding off, yet he still felt a wince of shame, of sheer awkwardness. Humility. He was like the alcoholic forcing himself to return to past friends and relationships and make amends. He parked on a stretch of street near a corner, under a big tree; the closest house had foot-high weeds for a front yard. He slept in his car for a couple hours, then kept low in his seat as the few neighbors passed driving off for work.
He looked at the photo of Leeann Holt at seventeen, all defiant and sexy, too cool for school. Torres had told him the address, and he remembered this street now. The houses small and the same design, most of them, many with flaking paint, blinding spotlights, and chain-link fences separating yards. Overgrown yards. A few were spotless and defiantly so with power-washed driveways and new siding. The housing bubble had been kinder to other Portland streets, bringing more houses like these back to life for a brief time, but not every street could be a winner. Half the houses still had either For Rent or Foreclosure signs. The house of Leeann Holt’s parents stood only a few houses down. It had a Foreclosure sign. It was a dull white, the tone of a primer that had never been painted over, and the weeds had won in the flowerbeds.
Sometime between leaving Pineburg and waking and staring at the Holt house, whether through fatigue or the certainty of his reasoning, Greg had become convinced that Gunnar was his biological son. The parts that didn’t fit Donny matched him. The fuller face. The build.
He slept some more, in fits and starts. At about nine a.m., he pulled up to the house and walked up the driveway to the front door. There was a peephole, so he stood front and center. He pressed the doorbell but heard only a dog bark inside a neighbor’s garage. He knocked. He waited.
The door cracked open. He saw her face. It still had soft lines but had sagged, framed by thinning hair.
“No way. Leeann? Leeann Holt?” he said. He’d practiced this.
“Well, fuck me,” Leeann said, her voice croaky like she had just woken up, but Greg guessed it was always like that.
He didn’t know what to say now.
“Well, come on, come on in,” Leeann said, waving her hand down low as if for a dog, Greg thought. Once inside, he saw her eyes were veined and glazed with worry. She wore sweats, and she seemed shorter than Greg remembered, but it was probably just the furry slippers giving her no lift. He thought she looked ten years older than he did and wondered if he would’ve recognized her if he hadn’t come looking for her.
“Can you wait in here?” she said.
“Sure.” She left him in the living room. It was the room of an elderly couple with heavy floral drapes and marred colonial-style furniture. He hoped her parents weren’t going to come rolling in—he had made a point never to meet them and didn’t want to start now. He had only been in this house when the parents had gone for the weekend, and when they were home Leeann had always had he—and Donny—pick her up outside, up on the corner, or at the nearest 7-Eleven.
He had planned to start by telling her just what he thought of Torres using her to get at Donny, but now, in the moment, he decided to play it cool, see what happened. Always the
reporter. The observer. Armed with more info, he would act.
He tiptoed around. In the kitchen he saw two packed bags sitting at the back door. He peeked back down the hall and, craning his neck and using the reflections of a hallway mirror, saw Leeann in a bedroom sitting at a vanity. She put up her hair, then let it down. She trimmed her bangs. She tried on alt-rock 1950s glasses like a singer in the B-52s would wear. She put on red lipstick. She stood at the mirror and squeezed up her face, and then loosened it in a reproduction of her sultry teenage smile.
She got up, vanished. Greg pulled back into the living room. The living room had no photos, he realized. That was what was missing.
Leeann entered wearing a look that was nearing passé over ten years ago but always survived—alt-rock, rockabilly, or country punk, some called it. It was Bettie Page meets Joan Jett, and Leeann’s lipstick only magnified the creases invading her lips. Greg had always liked the look even though it was one a girl often held onto for too long. His own look had a similar persistence, he realized, so who was he to get picky?
He smiled for her.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “They don’t live here no more. Why there’s no photos.” Her voice had somehow turned more hoarse than when she’d opened the door.
“I’m not worried.”
“Fuck you aren’t. You think I’d let you in here if they were?”
Greg shook his head rapidly, mocking fear, and they burst out laughing. It made Leeann cough and cough, sounding like BBs bouncing off glass, and she turned away to finish the job all that smoking had bestowed on her. He waited it out.
“Greg Simmons. Man, oh man. Twenty years gone.”
“Look at us,” Greg said, opening his arms, which showed off his faux-vintage shirt—a plaid like on a tin of Scottish cookies. “Like the original band members.”
Leeann laughed again and cut the cough short by clearing her throat, which Greg welcomed under the circumstances. And yet, as he eyed her, he saw that she still had it. There was just enough of what brought on the older guys and made Greg and Donny obsess over her. Back then it was the promise of something bolder, an edgier and more exciting world out there. Now? More like a lady working at the post office or deli who you just know has a story or two to tell, and you’d like her to tell just you. Greg wondered if anyone else saw this or if he was just applying his take from twenty years ago. Maybe others just saw a somewhat worn-out woman who’d probably worked too long at some tavern.
“You’re some kind of reporter?” she said. “Heard one time you were at the New York Times or some shit.”
“I was, sort of. I was a stringer, technically. I was in the newsroom a few times. So, yeah, I was.”
One of her eyes narrowed. “Apparently you still are, ‘cause you went and found me.”
“At your parents’ house. Not that hard.”
“I’m not living here that long.”
“Where are they? I don’t want to get busted.” Greg added a smile.
“It’s only dad left. He’s in assisted living. He thinks my name is Alan.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
Leeann shrugged. She eyed him a second, tapping her foot. Then she said, “Donny Wilkie faked his death. What you want to know, right? He paid some creepy-ass fuckers in Mexico to make it fake and then he went and snuck right back in the country like some illegal.”
“I know.”
“You do?”
“Were you with him then?”
Leeann snorted a laugh. “Fucking A right, I was. Right beside his ass. We shoulda stayed in Mexico. I woulda.”
Greg felt a pang in his chest, like indigestion. Was it jealousy? It embarrassed him, so he got out his next words as even and reporter-like as he could. “Were you two married then?”
She nodded. “Then we were.” She eyed him again, smirking. “Well, I can see this is giving you a big woody. Yep. A big ole woody.”
“No, it is not. You expect me not to want to know?”
“That there’s a good question, isn’t it?” Leeann turned away and started pacing the room, really wearing out the rug. Greg figured she was gauging what all she should tell him. He wondered why she was telling him anything. Maybe she had never even talked to Torres directly. It could just have been a quick phone call to the FBI, a cheap tip-off. But what had she said? He wanted to believe that she never knew about him and Donny at that lake. Donny had promised he had never told her, but how could he be sure? If need be, he would have to press her on it. He might even have to believe her.
She had stopped at a window, looking out but not too close, like someone afraid of watchers. Greg said, “You’re cooperating with them. I know you are.”
Leeann whipped around to face him. “Them?”
“The FBI. An agent named Rich Torres.”
Leeann let out a big sigh. It produced a cough and rattled more BBs. She passed by him and dropped onto the sofa, slumping, her palms up at her sides. He sat next to her. He said nothing, and he waited, ready to be listening. She pulled off her glasses and set them on the end table.
“I didn’t go to that Torres guy. He found me. How you think I’m able to stay here? Parents never let me,” she said. “I’ll get nothing from them,” she added. “I always knew that.”
“What did you tell Torres?”
“Wow, you make it sound like you’re the one who did something wrong.” She perked up, the marbly glaze of her eyes like cracked ice. “What exactly did happen way back then between you and Donny? Huh? You went your own ways real quick, or at least you did. Maybe you made a move on Donny—the guy was pretty fucking hot.”
“Why you being such a bitch?” Greg blurted. The words had come out before he could stop them. He didn’t regret it, only that he’d said it in the voice of his seventeen-year-old self.
“Fuck you. You don’t even know,” she said.
She was trying to turn this thing around, stay in control like she always used to be, or so it had seemed back then.
“And Gunnar?” Greg said. “What about him?”
Leeann bolted up and lunged. She slapped Greg hard against the jaw. It stung like hot oil.
“I wanted a kid with you,” she growled. “Asshole.”
“‘A’ kid?”
“The kid I aborted. The kid that’s not Gunnar.”
“So, Gunnar was from Donny?”
“Yes. Gunnar is from Donny.”
Greg slumped, as the reality sunk in.
“Dumbfuck,” she added.
Minutes later, they stood at opposite corners of the room, Leeann back by the window and Greg near the door. Greg had shot up and intended to stomp out the door and keep on going, but he hadn’t. She was daring him to leave, ready to watch from the window and make sure he was leaving for good. That’s what Greg told himself. So why give it to her?
The window light suited her, bringing back the softness of her face that always had, ironically, made her seem even harder to him. Those gentle contours always hinted at something tougher, like silk over steel.
She watched him watching her.
“I gave Gunnar up,” she said. “What, you don’t see how I could? Lots of people can’t. Fuck them. Sure, Donny slept around but he was actually kind to me, and he was real good to Gunnar, I can tell you that.”
He hadn’t been kind to her? He almost said it but swallowed the question back down. Of course he hadn’t been. “You could’ve protected Gunnar,” he said.
“Screw you. You don’t know half the shit that went on.” Leeann’s chin quivered. She glared at her feet, fists at her sides.
Greg took a step forward, and another.
She glared at him, her eyes moist. “No one wants to know about the mom who gives up custody. Give that baby away? How can a woman do that? A mother?” The tears ran down her face, and she let out a little grunt of pain.
She cried, and it sounded strangled like she struggled to breathe.
Greg headed for the kitchen.
“Stop,” she
said.
“I was going to get you a glass of water.”
“No, just come here.”
Greg came back over, and she took him by the hand. Her hand was hot, like just out of the shower. She sat him back on the sofa.
“You know where Oakridge is?” she said.
“Kind of. It used to be a logging town.”
“Used to be is right. I was living in a trailer, but I couldn’t even keep that heated. In goddamn Oakridge. You got no idea.”
“I have some idea.”
She shook her head. “I wanted to get farther from Donny, not too far that maybe I couldn’t get to Gunnar if I had to. I could save up. In the beginning there was work. Then it just dried up. Knew this one girl who got me on at a chicken farm in the valley. Used to hitchhike, bus if I could afford it. I fuckin’ plucked more fuckin’ chickens.”
She showed Greg a sad smile, which forced the same out of him.
“Know where Rich Torres’ boys found me? Washing my clothes in the river. Right near where I’d take a crap in the woods. People are living in the woods nowadays. Regular people. Their great-great grandparents hadn’t been worse off.”
“You could have looked me up,” Greg said.
“Look you up? Ah, and how was I supposed to do that? Facebook?”
She had turned into the bitch again, and yet he still held her hand. They eyed each other. She wiped at a cheek with the back of her other hand. The corners of her mouth turned up, and her eyes widened and brightened.
“Besides, Greggy Simmons, why would I go put myself through all that again?”
Greg leaned closer. Leeann’s smile faded, leaving a defiant gaze. Defying him to kiss her, make love to her. Hit her. Kill her? Greg resisted as if an iron bar ran right up through the earth and through him, keeping him grounded. Right now he understood her no more than when he had tried so many years ago. Yet it made him want to try again.
She let go and stood and faced away from him, head to one side, seeming to search for composure like a singer ready to go onstage. And she said: “Look, tell you what, can you just give me a ride downtown? My ole car’s about shot to shit.”
The Other Oregon Page 17