by Diane Lawson
“I didn’t kill my brother, Dr. Goodman. My brother died of asthma, not a dog. What you need to talk to me about is how I’m going to get out of here alive.”
For godsake, what does he want me to do? Freud, looking down his long nose at me, was of no help. I knew from accounts written by his patients that the Father of Psychoanalysis himself laughed when his two snarling chows lunged at his patients’ genitals. If they cringed, he’d interpret castration anxiety.
“I’ll walk you to your car, Morrie,” I said.
“No. No. No.” He began rocking up and down. “Not right. Not right. No touching. Analytic boundaries. One, one thousand. Two, two thousand…”
“I’m not going to touch you. I’m just going to make sure you’re safe.”
“Okay,” Morrie said. “Five, five thousand.” He rearranged the pillows. “Seven, seven thousand. Stay ten steps behind.”
I gave him his lead. He glimpsed back at me over his shoulder, his lips moving in the counting mantra he resorted to in times of extreme emotional crisis.
The three dogs and I watched Morrie descend the stairs and disappear northbound on McCullough in his mother’s old black Cadillac.
The phone was ringing when I got back into the office. The Caller ID displayed Richard’s cell number. I let it ring. This is Dr. Goodman. I’m either in session or… He hung up, just to dial me again. This time he let my entire spiel run and waited for the tone. I turned up the volume so I could hear.
“Pick up the goddamn phone, Nora. I know you’re there. Just pick up.”
I did.
“Don’t swear at me, Richard. What if I had a patient here?”
“You don’t have a patient now. I’m not an idiot. Your schedule is as tight as a nun’s asshole.”
“What do you want?”
“I’m at LaGuardia. My plane’s boarding…”
“Save your VIP act. Your schedule and whereabouts hold no interest for me.”
“Maybe this will hold some interest for you. This Mike Ruiz…something rang a bell for me the first time I saw him.”
Me, too, I thought, remembering how Mike had looked that day in his office. His phone crunched between his shoulder and his ear. His eyes twinkling. My body flushed at the memory. Miguel Jesus Ruiz, I wrote on my notepad. M.J.R.
“He got into some trouble in the department. Something ugly. Happened before I started consulting there. My source asked me not to reveal the details. I need to honor that.”
“I’m not going to participate in your pathetic agenda, Richard.”
“Ruiz was kicked off the force, Nora.”
“You don’t know that,” I said, but the instant knot in my stomach said he did.
“The only honorable ways out of Homicide are promotion and retirement. That’s common knowledge. Neither applies here. The guy is dangerous.”
“Shut up. You don’t know anything about him.” I shouted this, loud as I could to drown out the warning his words held for me.
Richard’s voice was cold and low. “What I know, Nora, is that you best keep him away from my kids.”
The stray was in the courtyard with Pugsley and Gizmo when I locked up for the day. The three of them watched as I came down the stairs, tails wagging in intermittent invitation to play. After I passed through the gate into the courtyard, the stray’s eyes narrowed in recognition, no tail-wagging now. He bared his teeth slightly.
I picked up an iron rake our yardman had left leaning up against the rock wall of the garage. Gizmo and Pugsley, always frightened by any alteration of familiar shape, made for the back porch. The stray ran the other direction, into the corner of the courtyard where the rock wall rises high to compensate for the grade. The dog realized he had no way out. He cowered against the wall, baring his teeth and growling softly.
I could have backed off, my weapon held at the ready, let the dog slink past me, out through the bars of the fence and into the street again. I could have kept Pugsley and Gizmo inside for a few days until the stray found another playground. Those are things I could have done. What I did was raise the rake and bring it down hard on the dog’s back. It yelped and turned pleading into the wall. And then I hit it again. And I kept hitting it, knowing full well that the act flowed out of my rage at Richard, not at this pathetic creature, flowed out of the pathetic creature that was my self. I kept hitting it until the disgust at what I was doing outweighed the shame at what I had done.
The dog had disappeared by the time I brought the kids home. Pretending to water the Mexican Heather with the garden hose, I sprayed the limestone rock, washing away the blood that had dried to soft shades of brown in the hundred-degree heat, watching the stained rivulet meet the pavers, divide into tiny streams that slipped cleanly through the spaces to find refuge in the harboring earth below. And the more I cleaned the louder the hose hissed. Crazy. Crazy.
And I remembered hearing another dog making nasty little yips and whines. Back then, I couldn’t move or I wouldn’t move until it was dead quiet. And my mother was on the floor wailing Ohmygod, ohmygod. And I found my father just standing there in the bloody kitchen. “Hold the knife for me,” he said, smiling and sticking that limp dog in my face. “Trayf made kosher.” And he pushed aside those yellow gingham café curtains that mother copied from a picture in Good Housekeeping and tossed my jump rope over the rod so that Buddy could dangle by his left rear leg, positioned just so the blood slipped down that proud white porcelain sink drop by brown red drop. I stood there watching until the police came to wrestle my father’s arms into the straitjacket and stuff him—yelling all the while, You dirty bastards get your cocksucking genocidal hands off me—into the waiting ambulance for all the bug-eyed neighbors to see.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“I just want to have it,” I said, looking him hard in the eyes. “I’d never use it.”
“You don’t know what the hell you’d do,” Mike said.
We were both on edge. I did tell Mike about the scissors. But, no, I did not mention the dog thing to him. He was already stressed out enough, trying to track down John Heyderman all day with one eye, keeping the other on Lance Powers, aka Sniperman. I didn’t think he needed to be burdened with problems of household maintenance.
If I were to believe Mike—and I wasn’t at all sure I did—John Heyderman had disappeared into proverbial thin air. His van had disappeared from the lab parking lot, but no credit card charges had shown up to reveal his location. After some sweet talk, his office manager told Mike that she’d found the usual to-do list from John when she’d arrived at work that Monday morning. She ran the place and was accustomed, she said, to going days without hearing from him. As Mike was leaving, she handed him an opened letter she found on John’s desk from the Bexar County Medical Society’s Impaired Physicians Committee requesting an interview. As good a reason as any, Mike believed, to skip town.
Lance, on the other hand, had been completely visible—Bible Study at noon, on a job site conferring with his crew boss early afternoon, then back in the office on the phone and doing paperwork until he closed up to head home.
“I’m an analyst. I know myself.” I pretended to be captivated by a squirrel in the live oak fussing down at Pugsley and Gizmo.
“Buy your own gun. Go down to E-Z Pawn. The owner knows me. Use my name.”
“The paperwork takes days. Maybe I don’t have days. Will you get me one or not?”
“No, Nora. I will not get you a gun. I think the scissors suit you. You need a better place for them though. How about this box? Nice piece, by the way. Cherry inlaid with some burbinga, looks like. Where did you get this?”
“Someone gave it to me,” I said. “A patient.”
In truth, the decorative box had been a gift from Richard, something he brought home from one of his trips, back when he still made a pretense of pleasing me. I remembered him going on about the dark wood being from Africa. I’d never found any use for the box as a container, but the scissors did fit perfectly.
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br /> “You okay?” he said, trying to be conciliatory.
“I wouldn’t shoot anyone. Things just feel weird. I feel vulnerable up here.” I resumed staring out the window, hoping for a fight that might lead to something else. When he didn’t take the bait, I said, “I can’t understand why you begrudge me a little protection.”
Mike’s fingers dug into my shoulders. He whirled me around. His face was flushed, his eyes wet, his body shaking. “I am trying to protect you, Nora. From yourself. No one knows what they’ll do,” he said. “Do you understand? No one.”
“I do. It’s my business to.”
I spoke straight-faced, asserting that the communication between my conscious me and my unconscious not-me was seamless and reliable. I stood there and said these things in the same room and on the very same day that I’d seen fit to hide a pair of sharp-pointed scissors under my scheduler just in case I had need to add slashing to my list of therapeutic techniques. On the same day I’d beaten a poor stray bloody with a metal garden rake.
The mind is a wondrous thing.
Mike was not convinced. “Nothing goes on in your business like I’m talking about,” he said, loosening his grip, letting his hands drift down my arms. I turned away, but he pulled me to him, my back to his chest. His voice was low and hoarse with pain. “I’ve seen shit you can’t imagine. And every one of those things takes a piece out of you until all that’s left is a fucking lattice that the next hit will turn to dust.”
He said all this in my ear. I closed my eyes, listening to his words, breathing in the warm, complicated smell of him, taking that pheromonal download deep into my brain.
And when I opened my eyes what did I see but Alex and Tamar, binoculars in hand, ear-to-ear grins, waving at us from the tree house.
“Look,” I said.
“Mini-PI’s.” Mike waved. “I’m not getting you a gun, but I’m going to grant you another of your wishes. I’ll take Alex to shoot some skeet at that place down on Contour.”
Alex was ecstatic: “Really? Are we really going?”
He was even more excited that Mike let him use the shotgun he’d had as a boy.
The two of them pulled back in about 5:30 after their first session, all smiles and high-fives, Guns and Roses booming out of the open windows of Mike’s car.
“He pulls to the right if he’s not paying attention,” Mike said, his arm around Alex’s shoulder. “But when this boy concentrates, he’s dead-on.”
Alex stood tall, holding his shoulders back. After his second go on Wednesday, he was yes-ma’am-ing me when I asked him to do something. By Thursday, he’d stopped picking on his sister. He liked shooting. He took pride in his progress. Mike agreed he could keep the shotgun under his bed—no shells allowed in the house, of course. I’d never seen my son so happy. So confident. Was I supposed to forbid it?
“Have you lost your mind?” Richard called the instant he found out. Alex had let it slip.
You can’t count on the man to feed the kids dinner or have them do their homework or pick them up from school on a set day—Goddamn it, Nora. I’m trying to make a living. I don’t control my schedule. But you can always count on Richard for an opinion.
“You give a thousand bucks a year to that Brady Bunch Gun Lobby,” he went on, “and now you’re letting this sociopathic dickhead teach my son to shoot a gun.”
“Guns don’t kill people,” I said.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
I didn’t know what it was supposed to mean. What I meant was Shut up, Richard. Just shutshutshut up.
“He enjoys it,” I said. “It’s giving him some self esteem.”
“I thought that’s what all this baseball stuff was for.”
“Like you do a lot to help him with that.”
“It isn’t my thing.”
“What is your thing?” I said. “Just what is your thing?”
“I warned you about letting the kids be around this guy, Nora. I’m dead serious.” Then he said the words that would have ignited hot fear in the heart of a mother, if that mother had her wits about her. “I have to protect the children. I made an appointment with my attorney to discuss custody.”
“Yeah, Richard,” I said. “Whatever.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Let’s take a little ride,” Mike said Thursday night after Richard picked up the kids for an impromptu bookstore and ice cream outing.
“Where?” I said.
“Do you have to manage everything?”
“I was just making conversation.”
“Everyone’s every word means something else but yours,” Mike said. “Is that the way it works, Dr. Psychoanalyst?”
“Do you want to take my car?”
“No. I don’t want to take your car. We’re passing for low class, low riders tonight.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I said, although it wasn’t far from my thought.
He took a right onto McCullough and a left on Mulberry, past the Baptist mega-church and the southern end of the Trinity University campus. We slid under the McAllister Freeway, still humming with the tail-end of rush hour traffic, through Brackenridge Park, the city’s neglected green space and swung right on Broadway, following the way of declining property values. He slowed as we got to Mahncke Park, the overgrown median strip of Funston Boulevard.
“There she is,” he said, making a screeching U-turn. He slowed as we passed a woman sitting on a bench, pulled around the corner and put down his window. We waited. The cicadas in the trees screamed at the heat.
She took her time approaching us on teetering heels, waving a boa in her right hand. “Mickey Ruiz,” she said. “Long time.”
“Darla, darlin’. You never age,” Mike said, in a voice that reminded me too much of George Slaughter.
She was six feet tall on her own merit. The feathered blond wig and heels credited her at least six more inches. If she hadn’t aged, she’d been born old. Her skin told tales of a multiple-pack-per-day habit and hard time spent in loser bars. Her pupils looked blown. Her hands had a fine tremor.
“Not back on Vice, are you? Or are you here on personal business?” She stuck her head in the window and gave me a good looking-over. “I don’t do threes-ies.”
“Me either. Can’t multi-task worth a damn.” He handed her a card and a twenty-dollar bill that had been stuck in the visor. “I work for myself now. Thought we’d talk. Catch up on old times.”
“Looks like talk is cheap,” she said, putting the bill into a pink patent leather clutch she carried under her arm.
“Just wondering if you’ve seen the doctor lately,” Mike said.
“What does it matter, if you’re only looking to talk?” Darla smiled then, revealing that she was missing several significant teeth.
“The doctor. Your regular.”
“No, my Johnny-boy hasn’t been around this week. And it’s putting some strain on the budget.”
“You need to stay away from the meth anyway.”
“You know what they say, don’t you? People who don’t do meth don’t got nothing to look forward to.” She laughed a laugh that sent chills down my back.
“Call me if you hear from him, will you?”
“Sure thing, Sugar.”
Mike put the car in gear. “You take care, Darla.”
“Keep in touch, Detective,” she said, turning back to her bench.
“What’s wrong?” Mike said, after we’d gone a few blocks.
Something was wrong, but I couldn’t get my mind around it. Something like feeling left out. Something like jealousy.
“Nothing,” I said.
“You’re a hypocrite,” he said, whipping the car into the parking lot of the First Tee driving range. He slammed the gearshift into park before we’d come to a total stop. The LeBaron rocked for a couple of seconds. “If something’s eating at you, you goddamn need to talk about it.”
“Okay. We need to talk about our relationship.”
&n
bsp; “Yeah?” He swiveled in his seat and leaned against the door with his arms crossed. “So talk.”
“I thought you might have something to say.”
“I say our relationship is fine.”
“Fine?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Fine.”
I knew better than to have started this conversation. I’d read the studies on neuro-physiological gender differences. Men and women experience negative emotion in different parts of their brain. Men register that set of feelings in the amygdala and the amygdala is poorly connected to the area of the brain where verbal processing happens. Women, in contrast, experience negative emotion in the cerebral cortex, a part of the brain that’s all about verbalizing. Bottom line, men are worthless at this kind of discourse. I just sat there for a while, fuming, trying to wait him out.
“Take your time,” he finally said. “We’re not leaving here until you get whatever it is off your chest.”
“I just keep getting these double messages from you.”
“Double messages? That’s the pot calling the pan black.”
“Kettle.”
“What?”
“It’s the pot calling the kettle,” I said.
“On the west side, we say pan.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Have you ever been on the west side?”
“I’ve been to your office.”
“Do a little more research on cultural difference and get back to me. Anything else?”
“Let’s talk about double messages.”
“Like what?” he said. “What are you calling double messages?”
“Try nuzzling my neck at the sink and then leaving. Try feeling me up and then sending me to my room alone.”
“Okay. We’ll talk about who started what. How about playing footsie under the dinner table when we just met? How about coming uninvited into my bedroom all perfumed-up in a silk nightie? And don’t forget that little Sunday afternoon blowjob. Appreciated, but clearly unsolicited.”