by Lisa Sandlin
Isaac said, “Here, let me get it for you.” He went over, twisted his palm against the cap, twirled it off, and held it out to her.
“Keep it.” She sprinkled out several aspirins and tossed them in her mouth. Swallowed some water. “Just throw that son of a gun away.” Her elbow pointed toward the bottle cap in Isaac’s hand. She opened the breadbox and snugged the white aspirin bottle into a back corner of it, and then carried the glass of water with her to the doorway. “G’night,” she said, flipping the light, throwing them back in the dark.
She padded away. A door shut.
Wooden legs slid on the linoleum as the stool was pushed to the table. Isaac was walking over. “Delpha—” his voice said. “Jeez I’m glad she turned off the lights. I want to ask you…would you ever consider…you could think about it, I don’t need to know right away…but maybe going out somewhere with me, I mean to the movies, what kind of movies do you like? Or out to eat somewhere…”
She could see him again now. His shoulders were rounded like an old man’s, his fists punching inside the bottom of his jean pockets.
“You have any idea how old I am?”
He bent forward and his lips collided with the side of her cheek, but they slid over and found her mouth, he breathed inside, touched her lips with his tongue.
She tilted her head so their noses fit right.
His other hand fumbled on her arm, and she stood up.
“I couldn’t care less how old you are. Does it matter all that much?” He dipped his head and kissed her again and drew her to his chest, leaving air around her, rather than trapping her backward against the table. Her arms went around his ribs and up, climbed till she was holding his shoulders, pushing up on tiptoe to kiss back. The deep root inside her strained outward, feeding the veins to all the rest of her body, forcing arms, waist, thighs, fingertips, toes, to stretch and bend and open. Heat rushed her cheeks.
Delpha murmured, “You have protection?”
White in his eyes. Frozen in place.
She’d scared him. Pushed him down one of those other paths in time, one that led to a cheerleader, ribbon in her hair and sticky panties, he was probably backpedaling from what he’d started with that kiss.
“N-not with me,” he said. “I have the car, but drug stores are closed.” He brought his watch up to his face to confirm. “It’s, yeah, it’s eleven thirty-seven, and they’re locked down but the bar, in the bathroom, they have machines…Change, change, do I have enough change?” Quarters bounced out on the table. He was counting them, not touching her.
She caught the chest of his shirt before he could break into a sprint.
“Isaac. Wait a minute. You sure about this?”
He started to answer, choked and had to cough it out, “Wait,” forearm covering his mouth. He hauled breath in. “Incredibly sure. I want to do this more than I want to be twenty-one. I don’t want to be twenty-one without doing this. I don’t want to be without doing this.”
“Then OK. There’s not just the one thing. You know that, right?”
Wonderment bloomed on his face. “Well, yeah. Sure, I…” The wonderment wilted. “Theoretically.” Isaac touched her hand that held his shirt. “Promise me you won’t leave. That you’ll be here in the kitchen when I get back. That you’ll let me in that door.” He pointed at it, as if there were three or four doors, and she might make a mistake.
Delpha held up index and middle and crossed them.
*
Her clothes were draped over on the chair, and his lay on the floor. Ceiling fan was spinning. He came with only the sight of her standing there. She squatted and put her mouth on it so he wouldn’t be alone in the finishing. When she lifted her head, he was slack-mouthed, head lolled back. She sat beside him on the bed, their bare feet on the floor like two people on a bus seat. It was kind of funny and for the most part not real, which made it easy for her. It was like a picture show, except the moment kept stubbornly going on instead of shredding or winking out.
Delpha turned sideways, jutting her knee out onto the bed, and she angled him around. Looked into his face, skin like a kid’s. Too dark to see the shade of eyes but the nose straight enough, ran her finger down it, light, so it wouldn’t hurt. Flat cheeks. Had a good jaw. One of those Adam’s apples that stuck out.
“How’d you get such broad shoulders. That a family thing?”
“Swim team.” He was gazing at her breasts. His lips were open. He smelled like sweat and soap and beer and some kind of aftershave but not Old Spice.
Her skin must be whiter than this bed sheet, white as cornstarch.
He reached.
“One second, OK.”
He looked in her eyes then. She looked back. They said something, on her part it was verifying: this kid, this man, this male person, there was a message but she didn’t know what he said, guessed he didn’t know either. She touched his chest. Few hairs round the nipples. Muscles on his flat belly. Felt the ribs. No gut at all, inward curve. He was circumcised, first one she’d seen. She touched his wet dick, and it moved in her hand, and he groaned. She let go, and he groaned again. Ran the heels of her hands down the long, long length of his thighs to the muscles above the knee, then back up the taut sides of his legs. He was hard again.
He opened his hand so she could have the foil package with the rubber. She took it. “You got huge feet, Isaac.” She grinned.
“Thirteens. Don’t expect me to know anything. I don’t—”
“Yeah, you do.”
He was quiet for a while. “May I touch you now?”
Listen to that, May I.
He did what she had done. His hands hovered on her breasts, not squeezing or pinching, letting his palms graze her nipples, then he rounded his hands and contained them. He bent and rested his face, then his lips on them as his hands traveled the curves of her waist and the flare of her hips and the insides of her thighs. He put a finger inside her and exhaled choppily, avoiding looking at her. “It goes in so—”
She rolled down the rubber, hoping she’d got it on the right way, scooted back and brought him with her. The second time didn’t take long but long enough for Delpha’s body—and not solely her brain—to confront a proposition: that the present was recording a piece of time she might want to keep rather than stack up and dismiss. That she was not in Gatesville Women’s Prison, favoring Rita who had a pretty face and poor table manners and would always take up for her. Or Rita favoring her. This was a new piece of time.
XII
AT 6:30 ON a Thursday, Phelan parked in a space near the Holiday Inn office where he could monitor arriving guests. Tonight he’d gotten it together enough to equip himself with a thermos of coffee, a Mounds bar, and the evening paper, in addition to the camera with fast film. He sipped the coffee slowly.
At 7:10, the coffee and coconut long gone, a woman in a green Ford Maverick parked in a slot near the office but did not get out. Phelan jotted the plate number and noted the McGovern ’72 bumper sticker, Put A Human in the White House. Five more minutes and a black Seville, license J5489, coasted to a stop by the motel doors. The man who got out automatically buttoned the second button of his jacket, as though preparing to step up to a witness stand.
That was his guy.
Lloyd Elliott was maybe five ten, with a little paunch and hair combed straight back. Not a lot of it on top and not trying to hide it. Late middle-age. Furrowed brow, worry lines all over the map. The woman in the green Ford waved to him. He raised a hand to her. As he stood there, hand up, twenty years tumbled off him. A younger, taller man entered the lobby to sign in Mr. and Mrs. Jones.
Phelan snapped a photo as Elliott leaned into the Ford, probably giving her the room number. The woman touched his chin, and he smiled. Snap. Phelan gave the Ford and the Seville a long lead, then carefully followed them around to the backside of the motel. The woman who got out was brunette, around five three, regular weight, pretty but not beautiful. Her tip-tilted nose was shiny, lipstick pale if any.
She wore a billowy-sleeved flowered blouse and maroon pants, a modest bell to them. And boom, ring on the left hand. They entered Room 162, Elliott unlacing his fingers from hers to hold the door for her.
Snap.
Phelan needed one of those zoom cameras so he could find a slit of curtain to shoot through, get some flashes of the action. His opinion was that that’s what the husbands would be looking for, the nitty gritty, but being as this was the wife, a clench might do it. Hadn’t got that yet, and he wanted the smoking gun. Like the reporters these days, sniffing around for Tricky Dick Nixon’s smoking gun. Hadn’t unearthed it yet.
Figuring the clench was most likely to happen when they left, Phelan settled in to wait some more. Maybe Lloyd was a two-minute kind of guy. Thing was, the coffee had backed up on him. He should have thought of that. Phelan had to take a leak, and he had to stay where he was. He toughed it out for twenty-seven minutes then got out of the car, leaving the door open a crack, and walked behind the trunk. Looked around, unzipped.
They came out of the room.
Phelan slithered back into the car, leaving the door quietly open. But he could have slammed it and popped a wheelie for all the couple out in front of 162 would have noticed. The woman was barefoot and crying, Lloyd Elliott in his shirt sleeves trying to surround her with both arms, all the worry-lines back on his map. Slouched in his seat, ear out the open window, Phelan listened. If only he had a drive-in speaker clipped to the window. But theirs was a silent movie.
The woman put both hands over her face, her shoulders shaking. The billowy blouse was untucked, little strings that tied at the neck untied. Lloyd reached out to her but let his arms fall back helplessly. She turned to him, gazed up into his face. Then she put her arms around his neck. His hands closed on her forearms. They looked at each other for a long moment, leaning toward each other until their heads touched. Then they went back into the room.
Phelan’d got a shot with the hands to her face, starring the wedding ring. He recorded that tender stare-down.
After searching around under the seats for an old cup or coke bottle, he sacrificed his thermos by taking a piss in that. Thing had the benefit of a cap.
He waited another hour, jacket off, sleeves rolled. Alternately he stifled in the roasting car or rolled down the window for a breath of air, an invitation to the mosquitoes, which exulted in on him singing and stinging. A few minutes before too-dark-to-see, Lloyd Elliott and his girlfriend walked out of the room. Phelan held the camera tightly to his head to keep it steady. In between the black Seville and the green Ford, the couple embraced, they kissed, the lawyer clasped the woman to his chest, his chin on the top of her head, his eyes closed like he was standing in the parking lot of heaven.
Snap. Snap.
Smoking gun.
Soon as they’d gone, Phelan chucked a perfectly good thermos in the Holiday Inn’s dumpster. One expense Miss Wade would never hear about.
XIII
FIRST THING FRIDAY morning, he put a rush on the film by slipping the technician a five, but Ha-ha on you, Tom, all that really bought him was the first call when the photo packages rolled in Monday. Tuesday, he loomed over Miss Wade’s desk and had her set up a meeting to deliver the photos to their client.
“So when and where do I meet her?” he asked as soon as she hung up, but the phone blared again, startling both of them. Phelan heard her assuring Joe Ford that yes, she was at work, and yes, she remembered her appointment this evening. She was about to hang up again when Phelan said, “Lemme have him.”
She handed him the receiver. Phelan asked Joe if anybody they knew had taken up the law.
“Son, I work with the ones that took against it.”
“I know, smartass, but what I’m wondering is—”
“Miles Blankenship.”
“Who?”
“Drum major with the funny hat. Valedictorian.”
“Him? That was Miles Blankenship that gave that speech?”
“Yeah, saw him at the ten-year reunion, the one you didn’t go to. Drives a Lincoln Continental. His wife’s homely, though.”
“And you got yourself one beautiful Amazon. How’re those twins of yours?”
“Future Hall of Famers. I tell you Kathy’s ’bout to pop out another one? We’re working on the starting lineup.”
“That’s some easy work. Thanks, Joe.”
Phelan flipped through ATTORNEYS until he found Miles Blankenship. Same business address as…he licked his fingers and turned the tissue-like pages until he matched Miles to a law office ad. There it was, Griffin and Kretchmer, Miles’ top dogs. Here Phelan’s trunk held a P.I.’s toolkit—pry-bar, wrenches, hammer, rope, twine, Baggies, flashlights heavy and slim, change of clothes, raincoat, couple hats—and turned out the Yellow Pages were his best friend.
Phelan pondered how to approach his old acquaintance. He could buy him a drink, but it was weird asking a guy out for a drink unless you’d already drunk with him. He shelved that idea and just phoned him, prepared to remind Miles they’d gone to high school together.
But Miles recalled a little matter of a couple tackles lifting his tall drum major hat after a game. They had squeezed him out, played catch with it until Phelan snatched the hat from its flight plan and tossed it back to Miles.
“Hmm.” Not something that had stuck with Phelan. “All I remember is you giving that speech in the city auditorium.”
Miles Blankenship coughed. “Sure thing. You and my mother. She thought I should have used fancier language.”
“No, it was good. ‘We’ve inherited a crummy world. But we can fix it.’ You were right on about the first part. Hope the last is true.”
Silence on the other end. “Thought you were blowing smoke.”
“Nope, you got my attention.” And Miles had too. For Phelan, the lines were a showstopper. He’d been struck by the foreign notion that anything he might do could repair crumminess. Had not fit himself and fix-the-world into the same toolbox before, but he savored the idea.
Nothing was forthcoming from Miles. Probably surprised to hear his eighteen-year-old self quoted back to him ten years later. Phelan felt like a prize wuss himself. He launched in on what his new business was and what he needed: details on the Daughtry-Enroco case that a lawyer named Lloyd Elliott had handled. If Miles knew anything. If lawyers all talked shop at some lawyer bar.
“Some do. Not me so much. But here’s what I heard.” The case was over a formula. Daughtry developed it. Allegedly someone slipped it to Enroco, Daughtry caught wind of that and sued. Enroco claimed simultaneous discovery in its own Ph.D.-packed R&D, but after some negotiating, the lawsuit went away.
“Kind of an unusual outcome,” Miles said. “Enroco hoisting the white flag.”
“Suppose so. Daughtry still in business?”
“That, I couldn’t tell you.”
“What’s Elliott’s rep among you men of the bar?”
“Standard enough, earned his partnership, not a hotdog. Does well for himself when he could be swinging in a hammock.”
“Meaning what?”
“Well, the wife.”
“What about the wife?”
“You have been out in the bay, Tom. Hadn’t heard of Neva Elliott.”
“Yeah, well, you lawyers want oil in your cars, I was doing my best to help you with that.”
“And my car is damn grateful. But Neva Elliott…ever heard of Midas?”
“In Mrs. Fortner’s English class, I think. Changed everything to gold just by touching it. Married to the woman with snakes for hair.”
“Hey, now there’s a stand-off.” Miles laughed. “The Elliotts don’t have kids. But whatever Neva and her Wall Street partners touch turns to gold. Lloyd Elliott could twiddle his subpoena all day if he cared to.”
Phelan dotted his ballpoint against a notepad. Neither one of them needed money. But then, nobody minded having too much money, and the wife’s pile might be motive for Lloyd to hang on to the marriage. Just, he hadn’
t looked like a man who cared about cleaving to any woman other than the one with her arms locked around his neck.
So why not just split? Why rub Lloyd’s nose in the pictures and humiliate yourself doing it? Peculiar. Unless the Mrs. was after his girlfriend. Stir up shit, kill off the girlfriend’s marriage as a token of her appreciation to Lloyd.
Even that didn’t—Phelan pulled himself up short. There was a business opportunity in this phone call. He offered to help Miles out if he ever needed some investigation and in return, could he call Miles when he was looking for info about legal cases? Asked if Miles would be a contact.
“Sure, as long as they’re not our cases.”
“Great. Appreciate your time.”
“My mother would appreciate you remembering my speech.”
Swathed in pink ribbons, Phelan hung up. “OK, back to Mrs. Elliott,” he said to Delpha. “Where does she want me to bring the photos?”
“J&J Steakhouse. The restaurant has a museum called The Eye of the World. You know about that? Tomorrow night at ten.”
“Now that is one supremely odd choice. What’d she say to you?”
Miss Wade’s brow creased. “Mrs. Elliott talked like she needed to convince somebody. Educated woman—she used a word I had to look up in my dictionary.” Delpha slid out her top drawer and showed him a miniature book with a red plastic cover so, Phelan guessed, you could consult it in the rain or the bathtub.
“I just agreed with her. Sounded to me like she wants to make Lloyd think more than twice before he cheats again—she said him getting your pictures would be a deterrent. Now, that particular word, I didn’t need to look up. It’s big around Gatesville.”
“She’s also a very wealthy woman, according to my old friend Miles. So rich her husband probably wants to keep being her husband.”
Delpha frowned. “She seem high-strung to you?”
“Among other things. Night I met her down on College, I didn’t see her mouth move, but her scotch disappeared. Like drinking with a ventriloquist.”