by Barbara Bell
“I don’t think so.”
I reveal the scar to her, careful not to show any of the other nice marks.
“That’s a jagged cut. Not surgical, unless your surgeon was drunk. Looks like a wound.”
I’m really stumped. The rest of the interview is a waste.
She gives up and hands me a free packet of Prozac. “What did you do to your face?”
“I have a rash.”
Helen makes an appointment for me in a week. On the way out, I ditch the Prozac.
While stewing about my famous scar and its being on the wrong side, I begin to whack things off my list. The first order of business is the bank. I use my Elizabeth Boone IDs to withdraw the whole pile of money from my account. Ben has a way of getting to things. And after last weekend, I have a suspicion that Ben isn’t going to let me go anywhere if he can help it.
I have them put the lump sum in a bank check. Then I jump into my Porsche again and tool down to South Philly, averaging about ninety. I swing into the first bank I see and cash the check, having them put it in small bills. At the next bank, I keep five thousand out and dump the rest in a safety deposit box. I check the card Bob gave me and ask directions.
It’s in one of the seediest neighborhoods I’ve been to for a long time. I walk in. Shopping in gun stores is like eating at McDonald’s. You begin to feel at home. I take my time, asking lots of questions like some dumb chick. Then I reach in my purse and flash a big wad of bills.
“Uzi?” I say. “With all the extras.”
The gun guy’s an Asian man in his late sixties, I’d say. He has a heavy accent. “You cop?”
“Would a cop have a face looking like this?”
He frowns.
“It’s my boyfriend.” I begin to sniffle. “He threatened to kill me.” I show him a couple welts.
He shakes his head, waves his hands, and starts talking to me in his native dialect. I think he’s giving me a lecture.
“One week,” he says. “You come back.”
I bite my lip, wondering if it’s a setup. But what would be worse, Ben or the cops?
“Okay,” I say, turning to leave. Then I have a brilliant idea. As a matter of fact, given the present circumstances, I think it rates as one of the smartest things I’ve ever done.
“Fake IDs.” I drop a fifty on the counter. “I need to blow town.” He sits staring at me, his face unreadable.
Just as I’m thinking I should make a quick exit before he calls the cops, he writes out an address on a scrap of paper. I check the address and see that the place is just a block away. I thank him as I back out the door.
But I have to make another stop first. So I cruise the neighborhood until I find a beauty shop with bars over the windows and door. Inside, one whole wall has row upon row of fake heads with wigs. It looks like a night at the symphony.
Mandy and me found a wig and a toupee in a Dumpster behind the Beauty Box in town. It appeared as though some couple had to arrive in tandem to get their retreads. We tied the toupee to a string and hung it from a tree branch like it was a spider, and we used the wig at night when Vin, me, and Mandy did séances sitting by the river in the dark.
At night the river swells and grows in power, getting you to feel like you should just give up, lie down, and let it drag you off . It can throw up a thick fog or thin-layered mists. I’d lie awake in the two-room, hearing its low thunder, its wearing down the banks.
When I was little, sometimes I’d scare myself listening like that and take up crying. Mama would bend over me whispering, willow, willow wand, willow weep, willow song. She hummed like the night hummed. Mama stroked my head and cheek. Sleep, sleep. Wander the river and the river’s long creep.
And the cool, she’d say, drawing it out long and low. And the cool, cool stream. The lily leaves floating.
I choose a blond wig. The hair falls shoulder length with a little bounce. The layered bangs tend to the side.
“That’s some lip you got there, girlfriend,” the store clerk says to me.
“He didn’t like my hair.”
I stick on my new hair and drive back to the address the gun guy gave me. It’s a little copy and print shop run by some people of unknown Asian origin who look a lot like the man in the gun store. In the back room they have a camera. Half the money down and the other half when the IDs are ready.
“Two weeks, honey,” she says to me.
“Two weeks? You’re killing me.”
“You want birth certificate? Two weeks.”
As I’m breaking the speed limit right and left on my way back to Connecticut, I feel myself overhyped and bristling with weapons. I slide in a CD by Arvo Pärt. Miserere.
Miserere mei, I sing. Dies irae dies illie.
I learned music at Ben’s. When we were working out with the weights and the machines, we’d turn up the volume and blast out everything from Metallica to Mozart. If any of us got out to do some shopping, the record store was always the first place on the agenda.
Kat was the one that turned me on to Arvo and Janice Joplin. A good mix, I think. About that time, Kat also handed me a copy of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. I learned revery. I learned sublime. From Virginia I learned of the brightness and the dark wedge. And after I read about the fin in the water, I was prepared for what followed.
Kat got so sick one day that Ben took her away. She never came back. Toni got AIDS. Then Violet came. Ben wouldn’t let Violet be, and his moods got bad. He kept the whips close at hand. His plays got more dangerous. The longer it went on, the more I clung to Violet, who, when all is said and done, was the stronger of us two.
I was willful and Ben whipped me regular for it, but Violet was smarter than me about these things. And she was determined to get out.
Oh, I loved her, I remember now (another chit) waking after a night of cuffs and whips to the smell of her hair and the warmth of her skin along my side. We became lovers. I waited for the moment when her eyes moved to me slow, like the way the river flowed, lazy in the heat, but forceful beneath. She hated Ben for whipping me. She hated the way he used me for his darkest shows.
He’s in love with you, she’d say.
No, Violet. He rides me too hard.
She’d narrow her eyes.
You’re not paying attention. I see his eyes when you walk by.
That’s just Ben being Ben, I convinced myself.
We got to break out of here. Got to, Violet said.
I remember her voice. It had the ache of a sigh.
Just like I could learn the punches, she learned Ben’s mind, his moods. She’d egg him into putting her in the box, just to see if she could. Just as he handed her pieces of food, she’d let go a look, a touch. She used me, parading my love of her in front of him daily, pushing him, sinking in barbs.
Those two were poison.
And watching Ben as I always did, as we all did for self-protection, I wondered how much he just played along with her, letting her dig herself in deeper.
Ben darkened. He growled. The plays got rough. I’d have to sit out some nights because my bruises were too bad. Clients didn’t like the merchandise damaged before they got to it.
Another chit now. The night Ben went crazy like he had some form of the berserks.
We’d just finished a long play. I was still bound. Violet was starting to undo my straps, and Jason was cleaning the floor.
Matt was bent over a table, strapped down. Ben let loose his arms, but not his feet and neck. He held Matt’s wrists tight.
“Everybody listen to what Matt has to say.” He smiled that bad smile and started pushing up on Matt’s arms.
We froze.
Nothing, nothing, Matt said.
Tell them, Matty.
I’m sorry, Ben. Stop.
Ben kept pushing up. What for? Matt’s arms were too high.
I cheated you, Ben. I did a trick in the park. I won’t do it again.
He took a trick in the park. Ben laughed. He pushed up hard.
I heard a pop and a crack. Matt’s arm was hanging loose, popped out of the socket. And his screaming was bad enough to make you shrink.
Ben jammed a gag in Matt’s mouth. He lifted the other arm. He was smiling big.
That was when Violet jumped Ben. He threw her off like he was swatting a fly, and Violet smashed into the wall. Ben grabbed her by the throat and lifted her off her feet. She hung up in the air, struggling, her mouth and eyes wide. Ben pressed his thumbs deeper. I yelled at him. He dropped her. Violet collapsed on the floor, heaving, making a noise like her tongue was stuck in her throat.
Don’t touch him, yelled Ben, pointing at Matt. He left.
Jason slunk over and let me loose. We helped Violet up, grabbing onto each other, and backed slow out of that room.
My agent leaves a message. “Time wants the interview Thursday. Pictures when your face clears.”
I curse.
When Jeremy gets home, he wants to talk about Helen and our appointment. Did it help? Was I sad? Were the drugs helping yet?
He’s like a German shepherd panting at your thigh.
I finally tell him I want to go write. He’s so proud of me, pulling myself out of my nervous breakdown.
While at my computer, I add to the “In the Taurus” list. I type in: Ladysmith. I peck out: shotgun and bullets.
The next morning, I start on my new program. At the spa I swim laps in the pool. After an hour, I lift weights. Then I do laps again and practice holding my breath.
I could always hold my breath the longest and by a long shot. Mandy was a lightweight in the breath-holding department.
We had a spot upriver where we tied a rope out over the water. It was a good ten-foot drop down.
The river curled in there, fattened out, and fell quiet. When you dropped off the rope, the water was hot on top, but before you knew it, you were down in something cold. I hated that cold underlayer, that shapeless ache below. I tried not to drop in too deep, but sometimes it reached up to get me.
We had a long week of rain from some hurricane that petered out before it hit the coast. The river was running full, lapping up near the two-room, and the next days beat on us hateful with the sun, so that all we could do was faint down in the shade of the willows in the afternoon. That’s when we decided to swing the rope.
It’s good I went first because of my breath thing. Down below, the river was tough. It wouldn’t let go, dragging me on. The undercurrent. Once I broke surface, I had to ride it all the way to Fowler. I trudged out of the eddy, water-soaked and scared clean through.
Maybe it was just water in my ears. But when I was down there thrashing mindless and struggling to get back up, I’m sure I heard that river laugh. It reminded me of Daddy.
He laughed when he started hitting. And sometimes people laughed at Mama behind her back. She was about as wide as she was tall and always carrying her bags of garbage.
At night, I’d get Mama to sit down in our one stuffed chair, and I’d rub her neck, singing her the songs they taught us in school. She loved that.
I loved Mama, even though she was fat. After she burned up, I pretended that she was light, just a breath of air, that I could carry her around, that I could lift her up and set her in the tops of the willows where the leaves shone silver.
When Mama and Vin were gone and I was alone, I’d jump down in that river and hold my breath, sinking into that shapeless ache, staying as long as I could. I promised myself that I’d get used to it, that nothing would touch me ever again.
In my head, I start trying to compose my letter to Jeremy.
Dear Jeremy.
No.
Dearest.
Oh, God, how can you lie like a rug in a suicide letter?
It’ll come to me.
After my workout Wednesday morning, I drive to the hospital where Jeremy and I had our synchronicity thing. I show my Clarisse Broder ID and ask to see the records of my stay five years ago.
It takes awhile.
The receptionist returns with a wad of papers newly printed out. I find what I’m looking for about five pages back. I read the diagnosis.
“Knife wound. Lower-left side.”
This chit could eat you alive. I’ve grown attached to my appendectomy.
After that, I drive to the garage where I’ve parked the Taurus. I open the back and pack in the loaded shotgun and a box of shells. I keep checking to make sure that my scar is on the left side. Maybe I’ve been wrong about it all these years.
Thursday comes with me all messed in the head about the interview with Time. I don’t know why I bother.
“You write a lot about your childhood.”
“Not my childhood,” I say.
“Off the record, how did you get that rash?”
And here I was thinking it was going away real nice. I become self-conscious. “It’s something I ate.”
“Tell me about your childhood.”
I shift around. “Like what?”
“Where were you born?”
I think fast. “Ohio” is all I can come up with on the spur of the moment.
“Where in Ohio?”
I don’t know a thing about Ohio, so I say, “I forget.” My lying capabilities waned after the age of five.
“You forget?”
“Yeah,” I say, on a roll. “Too traumatic. My therapist says I’m not supposed to talk about it. Just thinking about it gives me a rash.”
“It’s always that way with artists, isn’t it?”
“What, the rash?”
“The sensitivity, the dark underbelly of life.”
Honey, what I could tell you about the dark underbelly. Some of those dark underbellies are well-known public figures.
Ben and I were at the reception the night of my fake appendectomy because of the Senator. At Ben’s, he asked for me special, always having me in manacles and bent over. Ben would make an appearance at public functions every now and then to give certain clients a scare, to hold a little sway. I guess that’s why Ben never had any problems with the cops.
But the cop at the hospital, when I was still restrained and half out of my mind with a hunger for smack, that cop kept asking me about Ben.
“I’m Ekker’s girl,” I said over and over.
“Some people say you aren’t,” he said. “On the street, some people say you’re Ben’s girl.”
“What difference does it make?” I said. “I had an appendectomy.”
He frowned.
Detective Bates. That was his name.
“Did you know this girl?” He showed me a picture that made me want to throw up. I didn’t look at her face. I didn’t want to see it.
“No! I don’t know her. Shit!” I fought the straps. “I had an appendectomy. I fell down the stairs.”
He left me his card. “I’d be careful, if I were you,” he said. “You’re in water over your head.”
As though I could do anything at all about the water I was in.
Detective Bates showed up a couple more times, wanting to show me the pictures, but I refused to look. He stopped coming.
Which is really weird because on Friday after I return home from doing my hours of laps and holding my breath, there he is standing on my doorstep. I park the Porsche and meet him at the front door.
He’s not much taller than me and must be twice my weight, but he carries it funny for a man. He looks padded all over, like someone has taped pillows front, back, and sides, from shoulders to waist. He’s got the round face of a choirboy with the angelic part having disintegrated in bits. I guess because of carrying around too many pictures like the ones he tried to show me at the hospital.
“Mrs. Boone,” he says, holding out his hand. His clothes look like he balls them up in the bottom of his closet for a month or so until they’re just right.
“Broder,” I say. “It’s Broder.” He almost got me there. I don’t take his hand. “You know, you could benefit from a night course on ironing.”
He gets a smile some
what like Ben’s. “Funniest thing,” he says. “I found an old mug shot. Looks a lot like you, with the name Elizabeth Boone.” He shows it to me.
Oh yeah. I forgot to say I spent a couple of days in jail for shoplifting. Ben locked me in the box for that.
“So what do you want?” I say.