by T. C. Boyle
Milos tented his fingers and looked wistfully at Dana, whose head was bowed as she scanned the report, oblivious. “You are jumping,” he said, never taking his eyes from Dana. “Because this is not his name, why would it be?” He shrugged. “Just another alias.”
Sensing something in the air, Dana looked up.
“But he is not so smart, you know why?” Milos went on, pointing a finger at Dana. He let out a long breath. “Because he is in love with you.”
Dana looked to Bridger as if she hadn’t read him right, then turned back to Milos. “Love?” she echoed.
“With you,” he repeated.
“You mean, he’s in too deep—he’s got too much invested in this scam or whatever it is to give it up, right?” Bridger offered.
“Who you are,” Milos said, everything freighted on his lips, “he is. You can catch him now.”
Almost involuntarily, Bridger murmured, “But how?”
The sun glazed the windows, a smear of something suspended there in a tracery of false illumination. Bridger smelled his own sweat, primordial fluid, a funk of it, and he could smell Dana too, prickling and acidic. He wanted a beer. He wanted the beach, the ocean, peace and union and love, and what he had instead was this overcooked room and Radko’s cousin who was so cryptic he could have been writing fortune cookies in a factory in Chinatown. “How?” he repeated.
Milos pushed the hair out of his eyes, only to have it spring back again in a spray of glistening black vectors, and then he reached into the drawer a second time and shoved a piece of paper across the table to them. On it was written a postbox number in Mill Valley. “This,” he said, drawing it out, “is where bill goes. For cell phone. The address on this account is yours and landline number too, but bill goes here.” He was smiling now. “Very friendly man in Collections. I think you know him: Mr. Simmonds?” Another shrug. “It is a small thing.”
The clumsy lips, the imbalance of the accent: Dana wasn’t reading him, so Bridger translated for her as best he could. She watched him carefully, then shifted in the chair. “But what do we do about it?” she asked, her face drawn down to nothing.
Milos’ voice rode a current, higher now, as if a breeze had caught it. “You go,” he said. “You are Dana Halter too, no? You have proof?”
She nodded.
“Then that is your box.”
Sunday morning, early, they left San Roque in Dana’s Jetta, headed north. Bridger had meant to tell Radko in person—he’d made his choice, for love, for support, for Dana—but in the end, he opted for the easy way out: e-mail. Sorry. Gone one week. Emergency. Bridger. P.S. See you next Monday?
The sun was behind them as they pulled out of town on the Coast Highway, the ocean gathering light and throwing it at the pavement, the car a leaping shadow just ahead of them. Dana sat in the passenger’s seat beside him, her face soft and composed, her hair still wet from the shower and pinned up in a way that showed off the line of her jaw, the sharp angle of her cheekbone, her ear, whorled and perfect as a shell. She’d held him a long while that morning and then pulled back and signed I love you, the index finger pointing first to her heart, then both hands crossed in an embrace and finally the finger coming back to him, and he couldn’t resist her. They’d made love the night before, slow and languorous, the bed a raft at sea in the dark and silence of the room, and they fell to it again, on the rug in the hall after she’d come dripping from the shower and given him the sign: I…love…you.
What was he feeling? Burnished. Shining. Polished like a gem. The radio was cranked and she was bent over her laptop, alternately tapping at the keys and glancing up to stare out over the stacked-up waves with pursed lips and unseeing eyes, isolated from the moment and this place and the world. The music crept into him and he tapped out the rhythm on the dash. An old song, familiar as blood. Who, who, who, who, / Tell me who are you…
Five
SHE LOOKED UP from the screen and saw the sea spread out before her, the stalled distant waves like interlocking tiles, the spilled milk of the clouds, sun like wax—metaphor, everything a metaphor—even as the dim dripping forest of La Bassine dissolved in a blaze of light on water. Bridger was beside her, present and visible, one hand on the wheel, the other beating time on the dash. His chin bobbed, his shoulders dipped and rose. One and two, one and two. And now he was singing, singing in perfect silence, his lips pursed as if he were blowing out a whole birthday cake’s worth of candles. She glanced at the LED display on the radio: 99.9, classic rock. He was singing some immemorial song he knew and she didn’t, singing to himself, everything about him alive and focused and beautiful, running with the sound. She didn’t stop to think what it meant to go there, to that place where the hearing were transported in the way she was when she was writing or reading or locked away in the dark chest of the cinema while the shapes joined and convulsed on the screen and she saw with a clarity so intense she had to turn away from it; no, she just let herself feel it through him, through the weave of his shoulders and the rhythmic slap of his hand, and then she was beating time too.
The landscape sprang away from them. The dash gave and released, their two hands pounding. And then a car appeared in the inside lane and rolled silently past them and he shifted his eyes to her, his smile opening up, and he sang for her, sang to her, more insistent now, more vigorous and emphatic, his lips, his lips: Who, who, who, who?
She hadn’t thought past the moment, past packing her bags and the two new credit cards she’d got to replace the canceled ones, because it had all seemed so natural, so logical: the thief was in Mill Valley and he had a postbox at Mail Boxes Etc. and they were going to go there and find him, watch him, stalk him. And then what? Call in the police. In her fantasy she saw him striding into the shop to check his mail while they sat outside in the car—they knew his face, but he didn’t know theirs—and punched 911 into the cell phone. Or they’d get the mail themselves, find an address, an account number, trace him to his house and nail him there (yes, nail him, as you would nail a board to the floor). And in the fantasy she saw a SWAT team swooping down on him, men in flak jackets and protective headgear, candy-apple-red lights flashing on the cars, the helicopter slamming at the air, and she’d confront him then, spit in his face as he was led away in the same inflexible restraints they’d bound her up in, and she’d confront him again in court, the perfect witness in perfect control, the interpreter motionless at her side.
But that was the fantasy. The reality—and it made her stomach clench to think of it—might be less certain, might be dangerous. How stupid was he? How much in love with her base identifiers could he be when he knew he’d been found out? He might be a thousand miles away by now, more than a match for any amateur detective, and with a new name and a new persona. He could be anywhere. He could be anybody. But still, the thought of what he’d done to her without pause or conscience or even a trace of human feeling made her seize with the rage she’d felt all her life, the rage of shame and inadequacy and condescension. Revenge, that was what she wanted. To make him hurt the way she did. Only that.
They’d just passed King City when she looked up next. Bridger was no longer slapping the dash, no longer singing. He had one hand draped over the wheel, fingers dangling, and he was slumped down in the seat, looking tired. Or wiped, as in wiped-out, eliminated, destroyed. She touched his arm and he turned his head. “Are you tired?” she asked. “You want to maybe stop for lunch?”
He nodded and that was good enough because she couldn’t very well expect him simultaneously to keep his eyes on the road and his lips in her field of vision. But then he turned full-face and said, “What do you feel like—Mexican?”
“Sure,” she said.
He was grinning even as he swung off the freeway and onto the main street—the only street—of a town that consisted of a grocery, a gas station, a cantina and two cramped and competing taquerias called La Tolteca and El Sitio respectively. “Good choice,” he said, turning to her as he killed the engine.
They chose El Sitio and couldn’t have said why, no appreciable difference between the two places, both dark inside because electricity cost money, both run by the wives, grandparents and children of the men in the fields. There were four tables shoved up against the wall, a chest-high counter, the kitchen. The smells were dark and lingering, but good, a dense aroma of ancient chiles, refried beans in a pot crusted with residue, peppers and onions and the fry pan that was always hot. One of the tables was occupied by two super-sized white women with unevenly dyed hair—travelers like themselves—who were staring moodily down at the foil-wrapped remains of their burritos and clutching bottles of Dos Equis as if they were fire extinguishers. An old man, lizard-like in a white smock and trousers, sat at the table behind them, tentatively poking a pink plastic fork at a plate of scrambled eggs and beans. There was a handwritten menu on the wall.
Bridger consulted the menu a moment, then turned to the woman at the counter. He said something Dana didn’t catch—was he speaking in Spanish, was that it?—and then looked to her. “You know what you want?”
“I don’t know,” she said, using her hands unconsciously. She looked to the menu and back again. “I can order for myself.”
The woman behind the counter, as reduced and small-boned as a child, though her hair was going gray, watched them impassively. She was there to take their orders and their money and to give them a plastic chit with a number on it and to call out the number when the orders came up, and her eyes betrayed little interest beyond that. The menu was in Spanish: taco de chuleta; taco de rajas; taco de cazuela; tamal de verduras. It wasn’t a problem. Dana had lived in San Roque for more than a year now and she knew the basics of Mexican cuisine as well as she knew Italian or French or Chinese, and to make it easier for her, since she wasn’t prepared to wrestle with the pronunciation—English was challenge enough—there was a number attached to each item. She chose the fifth item on the list, tostada de pollo, turned to the woman and said, as clearly as she could, “Number Five, please.”
For a long moment the woman merely examined her out of eyes so dark there was no delineation between iris and pupil, and then she looked to Bridger and said something in her own language, which Bridger, at first, didn’t seem to understand. She had to repeat herself, and then Bridger nodded, the pale bristles of his hair gone translucent in the long shaft of sun leaching in through the door. “She says she’ll have the Number Five,” he said, and then repeated himself in his high school Spanish.
They took the table behind the two women—What percentage of Americans were obese? Thirty percent? Was that the figure she’d read?—and Bridger got them their drinks. He was having horchata, she a Diet Coke, out of the can. The women behind them were hunkered over the table, their faces animated, inches apart, exchanging confidences—gossip—and Dana almost wished she could hear what they were saying about their husbands, boyfriends, their ailments and beauty treatments and the children who invariably disappointed them. Instead, she asked Bridger what the woman at the counter had said. “And why didn’t she understand me? Wasn’t I clear?”
He dropped his eyes. “No, it wasn’t that. Or it was. She’s—well, her English isn’t too good—”
“Yes? But what did she say?”
He looked embarrassed—or reluctant—and she felt her face go hot.
“It was something insulting, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and then he said something she couldn’t make out.
“It was in Spanish?”
Instead of repeating it again, uselessly, he pulled a pen from his pocket and wrote the word out for her on the back of a paper napkin: Sordomuda.
Now she did flush. “Deaf-mute?”
He nodded.
What she wanted to ask was, “How did she know?” but instead she glanced across the room to where the woman sat perched on a stool behind the cash register, her head down, flipping through the pages of a Mexican tabloid; she wore gold earrings, the faintest points of light; a silver cross dangled from her throat on a silver chain. She was perfectly ordinary, like a thousand other women in a thousand other taco stands, Mexican restaurants and pupuserias, a woman who knew the feel of the mortar and pestle and the consistency of the harina paste shaped to fit the hand and pounded flat between the palms. But who was she? Did she have a deaf son? A deaf sister? Was she deaf herself? Or was she just superior? Contemptuous? Hateful?
Everything was in stasis, but for the right arm of the cook—a man so small and slight he might have been the cashier’s brother—which jerked rhythmically as he slid the pan back and forth across the gas burner. After a moment, she turned back to Bridger and signed, How did she know? but all he could do was shrug and hold out his hands. When their order came up, he went to the counter and brought back a paper plate and set it before her. The dish it contained didn’t look like a tostada. For one thing, there was no shell; for another, no lettuce. Instead, what she got seemed to be some kind of organ meat in gravy and a wash of melted cheese.
“What’s wrong?” Bridger asked, his mouth crammed with beans and rice. “Not hungry?”
Very slowly, with the tip of one reluctant finger, she pushed the plate away, and it wasn’t worth the explanation. She let her hands talk for her: No, she signed, not anymore.
“You want to drive?” he asked her. They were standing in the street outside the restaurant, the car glazed with the sun. It was hotter than she’d expected, hotter inland than she was used to on the coast. The heat drugged her and she didn’t see the woman watching her from behind the window of the taqueria or the pair of lizards chasing one after the other through the dust or the drift of yellowed claw-like oak leaves at her feet. She didn’t want to drive. She wanted to stare into the screen and shut out all the rest and she let her hands tell him so. A moment later, the town was behind them and only the vibration of the steel-belted radials, riding on air, told her they were moving.
Six
THERE WERE TWO bona fide bedrooms in the condo, one for Madison and one for Natalia and him, as well as an extra half-bedroom, what the real estate lady wanted to call a sewing room. Or a nursery. “Or”—with a look to him, coy and calculating—“a home office, an office away from the office. For when you get tired of all those patients.” It wasn’t much, not a whole lot bigger than the cell he’d shared with Sandman at Greenhaven Prison, but it had a view of the bay and the big stippled pyramid of Mount Tam, and Natalia had found him an oak desk, a pair of matching file cabinets and a Tiffany desk lamp on one of her far-flung antiquing forays. So it was an office. He hooked up his computer and his printer and did business here, reserving the computers at the public library for highly sensitive transactions, the things he didn’t want to risk having traced. Madison wasn’t allowed in this room, for obvious reasons, and he frowned on Natalia coming in to appropriate a pen or a pair of scissors, though once, when he’d forgotten to lock the door, she’d slipped in naked and put her hands over his eyes. She didn’t have to whisper, Guess who?
He was in the office now, at his computer, Natalia treating herself to a morning at the spa and Madison off at day camp, and he was doing a little research. It was the kind of thing he was good at, better than good—he’d made a nice quiet living at it for the past three years now, and if there was the occasional glitch, like that time in Stateline when he’d been up all night at the blackjack tables and he was wired and burned-out and maybe a little drunker than he thought, he had it covered. Post bail and walk and let them come after somebody else, Dana Halter or Frank Calabrese or whoever. It was nothing to him, not anymore, and if he hadn’t fallen for Natalia he could have lived in Marin for the duration, a doctor in a tailored suit and the calfskin duster he’d picked up last winter, money for nothing and the chicks for free, wasn’t that how it went?
The first time, though, when he was Peck Wilson and in love with his four-year-old daughter—Sukie, Silky Sukie, he used to call her—the law was a clamp, a harness, a choke hold that cut off a
ll the air to his lungs and the blood to his heart. Gina moved out on him and took his daughter with her, right back to the big Bullhead’s house, and why? Because he was a son of a bitch, a rat, a scumbag, because he was cheating on her and no fit father and she never wanted to see him again, never. And if he ever dared to lay a hand on her again, if he ever even thought about it—
What she didn’t mention, what the lawyer didn’t mention, was the way she’d come to treat him, as if he’d been hired for stud purposes only, to broaden the gene pool so the Marchetti dynasty could wind up with a granddaughter and heiress prettier than a queen and smarter by half than anything they could ever have hoped to produce. That, and to go on fattening the bank account by pushing himself day and night till his brain began to bleed out his ears. Without her, and with the unflagging bullheaded enmity of her father, Lugano went down the tubes within six months—the state came and closed the place up for non-payment of sales tax, which he had to hold out just to cover the suppliers—and the pizza place was reeling. But the divorce order, which he hadn’t agreed with but was too tired to fight, specified the amount he had to pay for alimony and child support and laid out the hours—minutes, seconds—he could spend with his daughter. Okay, fine. He moved to a smaller apartment, ran the wheels off the car. There was Caroline, there was Melanie, and what was her name, that girl from the bookstore in the mall? On Sundays, he took Sukie to feed the ducks at Depew Park or to the zoo at Bear Mountain or they hopped the train into the city to catch the opening of the newest kids’ flick or to see the Christmas display at FAO Schwarz.
Even now, sitting at his desk, watching the information come to him like a gift from the gods, he could remember the way it felt when he found out Gina was seeing somebody. He’d let himself slip—if he was working out more than every second or third day, that was a lot—and he was drinking too much, spending more than he wanted to on women who did nothing for him, letting work eat him up. He was at a club one night after locking up, a local place that featured a live band on weekends, standing at the bar waiting for Caroline to come back from the ladies’, thinking nothing, when somebody threw an arm round his shoulder—Dudley, one of the busboys from Lugano, the one who was always in the cooler, smoking out. “Hey,” Peck said.