Impersonal Attractions

by Sarah Shankman

  He straddled her, crushing his weight down on her bruised body. The pain in her right leg was excruciating.

  She looked into those gone-gone-long-gone, pale blue eyes, and then all the color in the picture disappeared. Black and white, her whole world dependent on those eyes, suddenly reduced to black and white.

  Where were they? All those men in blue? Black and white. Only black and white. Were they standing right outside her door, listening to her die?

  “Oh,” she moaned.

  Eddie put his face right down to hers, murmured, “Yes, yes.”

  Then he leaned back and the knife flashed before her. It waved, teased, tantalized, come to poppa, little girl, just above her throat.

  This is it. Last Chanceville. Now or never. Do or die.

  She flung her closed hand back and released it. The bright new brass key flew toward the space where the pane had once been.

  Just as the door disappeared. Poof! Vaporized as the good guys rushed in.

  It was a magic show. Puff of smoke. First you don’t see them, now you do.

  Blue steel pointed. Shouts. Heavy boots on hardwood floor.

  “Drop it! Now! Let her go! Now, man, now!”

  Then in a sleight of hand, she was levitated. Lifted. Floating. But there it was. You could see it. Not such a clever trick, supported from behind as Eddie held her, dragged her back, back into the bedroom, away from the men with the steel-blue guns.

  “Shoot, shoot!” she shouted. But Sean, yes, it was Sean, she knew he would come, but what help were he and all his troops standing there watching Eddie drag her with a knife at her throat?

  He inched slowly, back, back. In seconds he would be back against the wall, back against the windows. No place to run hide hide run hide there, Mr. Boogey Man. What was going to happen to her then?

  Hudson watched it all from his perch atop the bureau. The men in blue frozen, like children playing Statues. Afraid to move, or they’d lose the game. Annie, in a long, white, cotton gown, clutched against the stranger. Close, as if in an embrace, dancing. In little, tiny, sliding steps, and then dancing dancing dancing a jig as Annie’s cast caught in a throw rug and the rhythm got all crazy and they started to boogie-boogie, slip and slide, Annie leaning forward, the stranger back, his eyes wild, darting.

  Hudson, claws unsheathed, pounced.

  Eddie never saw him coming.

  But it was enough. Enough to throw him finely, finally, off balance in this world where he’d always been out of kilter, out of synch.

  Annie fell forward, face down. Hudson bounced free, frightened, hissing, furious.

  Eddie fell backward and he flew through the window with the greatest of ease. He soared to freedom, the freedom of darkness, of final forgetfulness and forgiveness five long stories down.

  At the bottom, beneath his head, a red, red rose of blood blossomed and then bloomed out of season. And the icy light in those pale blue eyes switched off.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  They were a jolly threesome sitting at a table outside in the February sunshine. Quynh was washing down a huge slice of chocolate cake with a glass of milk. Sam smiled at Annie, sunning her pale right leg, recently freed from its cast.

  “What a day!” Sam exclaimed. It was, indeed. Yet another perfect blue sky, the air crisp and snappy after a couple of days of rain. Sweater weather, wintertime in San Francisco. It was high noon at Enrico’s Sidewalk Café in North Beach, the street filled with shoppers carrying Chinese ducks, Italian bread, businessmen with newspapers, mothers corralling their broods.

  Sam nodded at the pile of travel folders in front of Annie. “How can you leave all this?”

  “I’m not leaving, goose, it’s just a well-deserved vacation. A couple of weeks in Italy. Linguine. Calamari. Risotto. Great, gorgeous mushrooms. The beach at Positano. Maybe a dash down to Sicily. Sure you don’t want to join me?”

  “It’s awfully tempting, my friend, awfully tempting.”

  Sitting between them, Quynh suddenly gasped. They turned to her. Quynh’s eyes were saucer wide, her mouth open.

  She was staring with a gaze so intense that its object at the next table, a bald, bearded man in a crew-necked sweater and jeans, turned his head.

  “Hello, small wonder,” he said to Quynh. The stranger was her hero, the poet Shel Silverstein. Her dream had come true.

  “Would you like some chocolate cake?” she offered.

  He roared with delight and, with a nod at the two women, scooped up both the cake and Quynh, lifted her and gave her a kiss on the cheek before he plopped her into a chair at his table. Within seconds, Quynh was reciting her poetry to him. He smiled and nodded and frowned in all the right places.

  “After this, how do you ever convince her that fairy tales don’t come true?” Sam asked.

  “You don’t.”

  “Then here’s to fairy tales.” Sam raised her cup of cappuccino. “And to Italy.”

  “You’re coming?”

  Sam nodded.

  “Can’t have my best friend in the whole, wide world going off on an adventure without me, now can I?”

  Their laughter floated up into the clear, bright air, circled around the pointed top of the Transamerica Pyramid, and hung a left out over the Bay.