The Devil's Wire

by Rogers, Deborah

  Lenise frowns. "Oh, yes."

  "I'm not supposed to say."

  "What is it, girl?"

  McKenzie looks at her. Tears are forming.

  "Tell me," insists Lenise.

  Suddenly she falls into Lenise's arms. "I don't want to move to Florida!" she wails.

  Lenise pushes McKenzie away. "Florida? What do you mean, Florida?"

  "I hate her!"

  "You're leaving?"

  "I want to stay here."

  "When did this happen?"

  "I don't know."

  McKenzie is crying hard and Lenise can barely understand her. "Come on now girl, get a hold of yourself. Tell me what your mother said about Florida."

  McKenzie steadies her tears and wipes her nose with the heel of her hand.

  "We leave in a month."

  *

  Lenise is sick of this shit. She is sick of the smell of garlic and hickory and salt. She is sick of the fatty residue on her fingertips even though she wears gloves. She is sick of being cold because some halfwit had set up her Palgrave's Best Beef Jerky stand right outside the frozen meats section. She is sick of the sound of the butcher's grinder slicing through muscle, bone and skin. She is sick of the sore feet and aching knees. But most of all, Lenise is sick of the people who look at her like she is nothing. Even the shelf-fillers seemed to regard her at the lowest end of the supermarket pecking order, lower even than that of the cart wrangler, who was apparently afforded more respect than her because of his retardation.

  She stands here most days, behind the little stand in her stupid fringed cowgirl's uniform with the American flag in her hand, and watches the customers ignore the plastic platters of diced jerky. Although to be fair, she can always count on the fatties who pass her by then secretly circle back and extend a pudgy hand for a cube (or two when they think she isn't looking). And there are also the pretend connoisseurs, who would stand there and chew in front of her, gazing up at the ceiling as if their delicate palate was trying to detect the nuances of flavor. But most just want something for free. Cheapskates who give not a second thought to how hard it was for a single woman to make a living these days, especially when her income depends on sales.

  To make matters worse, when she gets here this morning she finds her stand has been shifted directly in front of the fish section, a spiteful move on the part of the store manager probably because she'd complained about being so cold. It fit with the usual downward trend of her miserable life of late, including the very bad news that Jenny and McKenzie where moving to Florida.

  Lenise looks up. A man with a screaming infant and supermarket cart with a faulty rubber wheel careens around the corner. She turns her head, not wanting to encourage him and his noisy brat to head in her way. Too late.

  "You want to try some, Sammy?" says the man.

  The wailing child holds out his arm and moves his fingers back and forth in a grabby way.

  "There's chili in it," says Lenise, raising her voice over the skull-rattling cries, "and this one has whiskey in it, so I wouldn't give him that."

  "Sounds like a good idea to me."

  Lenise doesn't return the man's smile and cuts a portion of the plainest flavored jerky she has and gives it to the brat.

  "Here you go junior," she says.

  The toddler throws it back in her face.

  *

  When Lenise gets home she sees Jennifer removing grocery bags from the trunk of her car.

  "Jenny."

  Jennifer's eyes drop to Lenise's cowgirl outfit and Lenise wishes she had the foresight to change.

  "I apologize for the other day," she says. "For taking McKenzie to the gallery without your permission."

  To Lenise's surprise Jenny says, "I could've handled things better myself."

  Jenny looks worn out. Like she might be getting sick again. Then Lenise reminds herself why she's here.

  "When where you going to tell me about Florida?"

  Jennifer looks shocked. "McKenzie told you?"

  Lenise pats down her hair and the fringe on her sleeve shimmies like a wind chime. "Don't get annoyed at her. She was upset and had nowhere to turn."

  Jennifer stiffens and disappears into the trunk to retrieve the rest of her groceries. "I want a fresh start, Lenise. Is that so wrong after everything that's happened?"

  "You're running away."

  "I don't want to fight," says Jennifer.

  "Running away never solves anything, I should know."

  "Well, this isn't your decision, is it?"

  Lenise pauses. "I think you and McKenzie should stay."

  "Honestly, Lenise."

  Lenise reaches out to touch Jennifer's arm. "Jenny, please don't go."

  Then to her own revulsion, Lenise begins to cry. Big fat watery marbles slide down her cheeks and splash onto her suede boots and she wants to disappear. She's never shown such weakness in public and she might as well be naked. Then, unable to stop herself, she goes further.

  "If it's the house – because of what happened here – you and McKenzie can come and stay with me."

  Jennifer laughs.

  Lensie stares at her. "Heartless."

  "Lenise."

  "No," says Lenise. "You've made yourself clear."

  Lenise returns across the road, hears those stupid spurs jingle-jangling with every stride.

  "Lenise! Come on, I wasn't laughing at you! Lenise!"

  But that was a lie. Jennifer had taken Lenise for a fool and maybe that's exactly what she was.

  44

  Jennifer pours a cup of coffee and cradles the warmth in her hands. It has rained overnight and remnants drip in fingers from the eaves. A curl of sunlit steam rises from the grass. It seems perverse, this beauty in such bleakness of spirit.

  Overhead floorboards creak. McKenzie is up. When she comes downstairs, she doesn't say a word to Jennifer and heads for the cupboard and retrieves the special bowl and cutlery she has taken to keeping in the plastic bag that's for her use only.

  "I made eggs," says Jennifer, pointing to the plate on the table.

  McKenzie ignores them and reaches inside the pantry for a single serve of tuna and places the can next to her bowl then goes to the sink and proceeds to wash her hands, soaping up the front, the back, the sides, in between the fingers, like she's preparing for surgery. She rinses and soaps three times then dries off with paper towels. She sees Jennifer looking.

  "Don't make a federal case out of it," she says, finally popping the ring on the tuna and sitting down to eat.

  Jennifer points to the polished stone around McKenzie's neck. "What's that?"

  "Nothing."

  "Where did you get it?"

  McKenzie turns away. "Forget about it."

  Jennifer puts down her coffee. "Lenise gave it to you."

  "I knew you'd be pissed."

  "Hey – enough with the sailor talk."

  "Well, it's true. You hate everything I do."

  Jennifer sits on the stool and rubs her face with her hands. "I don't want to talk about Lenise. There's something more important we need to discuss. The police. A detective. He wants to talk to you." She pauses. "McKenzie, I had to tell him."

  Jennifer watches the realization dawn on McKenzie's face. "You had no right!"

  "There was no other choice. I thought he would leave you alone if I told him, but he won't let it lie."

  Jennifer places a hand on McKenzie's arm but she brushes it off.

  "You can't make me do this."

  "It's the police. We've got to do what they tell us."

  McKenzie turns and stares at her mother. "What's going on? Where's Dad?"

  Jennifer swallows. "What do you mean?"

  "Something's wrong. He wouldn't just leave and now the police want to talk to me."

  "I don't know what to tell you," says Jennifer.

  "They think something bad's happened, don't they?"

  "It's their job to ask questions, that's all."

  "Mom, please don't ma
ke me talk to them," she pleads. "I just want to forget about what happened."

  "It's not up to me."

  McKenzie wipes away a tear. "It isn't fair," she says, barely audible.

  "I know but you can do this, hon."

  McKenzie gets to her feet. "I just want to be normal," she says. "I just want to be like everyone else."

  *

  The room has an orange sofa and a single hard-backed chair. A pine coffee table separates the two. On top of the coffee table sits a jug of water and two glasses and a small unobtrusive recorder. One side of the wall is made entirely of mirror – the two-way kind – and that's where Jennifer stands in the dimness, arms around her middle like a brace, watching McKenzie on the couch.

  The woman in the restaurant was right. McKenzie could have been a boy. The dark, shapeless clothing, the short hair, those rounded shoulders – there was nothing feminine about her anymore. It was if she was trying to erase every part of her female self.

  McKenzie had insisted on doing the interview without Jennifer and the state-mandated social worker in charge of child abuse disclosures. Just him, McKenzie had said nodding at Detective North, and at first the social worker refused, saying it was against policy, but McKenzie informed them point blank she wouldn't talk otherwise.

  McKenzie and Jennifer nearly had a stand up fight in the waiting area but Jennifer had finally let it slide and watched unhappily as McKenzie was led away. After that, a female uniformed officer showed Jennifer to this room and said, "It's never easy for the mother" and left Jennifer and the social worker to stare unseen through the mirror at the stranger sitting on the orange couch who looks a lot like Jennifer's daughter.

  She knows she ought to give McKenzie privacy and feels like a thief, taking something precious Jennifer has no right too, but she cannot tear herself away.

  McKenzie tells Detective North everything. The nights. The days. Where. When. What. She leaves nothing out. It doesn't seem to matter to McKenzie that Detective North is a man, or maybe it's the very fact that he is a man that means she can talk so freely about what happened. For his part, Detective North sits in the chair, a quiet presence opposite her, listening gravely, asking one or two questions for clarification but otherwise giving her the room she needs to speak.

  At one point McKenzie falters and tears up and it looks like he's about to offer a hand of comfort, but he thinks better of it, choosing instead to say "we're in no rush" and he waits, patient and concerned, until McKenzie collects herself. Eventually, she carries on, scratching her cracked over-washed palms as she speaks while behind the two-way glass, Jennifer listens and weeps silently into her tissue. And when McKenzie is finally done, Jennifer has never been so glad that Hank was dead.

  Afterward, a spent McKenzie goes to wait in the car and Detective North turns to Jennifer.

  "Son-of-a-bitch," he says.

  "I didn't know."

  "It never occurred to me you did."

  He shifts his weight, tugs his ear lobe.

  "Sometimes," he says, "sometimes people get the idea into their head that taking the law into their own hands might be an acceptable thing. In situations like this, when a child has been hurt bad, people's emotions run high. Things might happen that people might regret. What I'm saying is that in situations like these the truth is important, more important than ever, no matter what it is, because there have already been too many lies told, because at the end of the day the truth is all we have." He looks at her and pauses. "Now's the time to say."

  "I don't know where he is."

  She holds his gaze, and he breaks off first, eyes landing on the potted plant near the exit.

  A uniformed officer emerges from a back office. "Ethan, your old man's on the line."

  Ethan nods okay to the officer then turns to Jennifer.

  "You have my number," he says.

  45

  Lenise stirs. She's in that loose, hazy space between waking and sleeping and tries to hold on to it. But it's futile. Something is dragging her into the world by her tongue. She's lying prone on the bare concrete floor. Her eyes water and she's not sure if it's from the stench or the stark fluorescent light. There's a puddle of vomit where someone has missed the toilet and more splashed on the door. Then she sees a person, a woman, sitting against the wall staring at her.

  "Where am I?" says Lenise.

  The woman ignores her and Lenise gets to her feet and promptly throws up.

  "God damn it!" cries the woman, pushing herself into the wall. "You nearly got my feet that time!"

  Lenise wipes her mouth and looks at the woman.

  "Who are you?" she says.

  "The virgin-friggin-Mary."

  Lenise shuffles over to the mirror, which isn't actually a mirror but more like the reflective steel they have in gas station bathrooms. Leaves and sticks are tangled in her hair, her eyes are ringed with mascara, and on the right side of her face there's a long bloody scratch. She turns to the woman.

  "This some white slavery kidnapping thing?" she says.

  The woman lets out a loud sharp "Ha! You'd be so lucky. You're more loaded than I thought."

  The woman, come to think of it, doesn't look much better than Lenise, and has a large black bruise on her left cheek.

  "This is detox," says the woman.

  "Detox?"

  "That's what I said."

  Lenise becomes aware of an ache in her chest and groans and sits down on a concrete slab.

  "That'll be your ribs. From the fight," says the woman.

  "Fight?"

  The woman points a red talon at her own black eye. Then somewhere in the fog a sketchy memory of a cop saying "You girls sort out your differences" and the sound of the steel door slamming behind them.

  "What day is it?" says Lenise.

  "Thursday."

  She'd lost three bloody days. She blinks at the floor trying to remember. Jennifer laughing in her face. Some shithole dance bar. Drinking. A blubbering call to Cody that was met with a "you're so disgusting when you're drunk". A park. Passing out. Coming too with someone riffling through her pockets.

  "You tried to rob me," says Lenise.

  The woman shrugs. "I thought you were dead."

  Lenise stares at the single, humming florescent strip. Dark outlines of dead insects line the bottom.

  "Got a smoke?" she says.

  The woman shakes her head. "You talk in your sleep, you know that? Ghosts and some such shit."

  "Any names?" says Lenise.

  "Nuh."

  Lenise lies on her back and closes her eyes. "Good."

  They fall silent then Lenise says, "What's the worst thing you've ever done, virgin-friggin-Mary?"

  "The absolute worst?"

  "Yeah."

  "I stole an old lady's rent money to get a fix. I ain't proud of it, but I own it now, you know? I think about that old lady from time to time. You?"

  "I left my back door open and my dog got out and was hit by a car and died."

  "Jeez."

  "I know."

  "That kind of shit would cut me up."

  "Strange thing is I became friends with the person who did it. Helped her out with something big, but she let me down."

  "That's a lot of the problem these days."

  "What is?"

  "Lack of gratitude."

  "Yes," Lenise nods. "There's nothing I hate more than a lack of gratitude."

  *

  They are released just before noon. Lenise steps out into the sharp morning light and her cell mate waves a goodbye above her head and sashays off down the road in her white dagger heel boots. Lenise is about to flag down a cab when she looks in her wallet and finds it empty. No money. Not a dime. That bitch had taken everything she had.

  She shoves the empty wallet back into her purse. What did it matter where it had gone and who took what and who didn't? No money, no ride. Her head pounds and her mouth is sore and her ribs ache and all she wants to do is crawl into bed but instead puts one leaden
foot in front of the other and begins the long walk home.

  *

  Lenise has the key in her door and is about to go inside when she sees a car pull up. A dark-haired man steps from the vehicle, handsome in an unkempt sort of way. At first, she thinks he's some sort of debt collector.

  "Ma'am," he says. "My name is Detective Ethan North. May I have a word?"

  His eyes linger on her dirty clothes, the scratch on her face.

  "Are you going to charge me with something?" she says.

  He looks startled. "Why would I do that?"

  "For the detox thing."

  The detective jams his hands in his pockets and looks over his shoulder at Jennifer's house. "I don't know anything about that. I just want to ask you a few questions about your neighbors – the Blakes."

  Lenise feels sick. "What about them?"

  "If we could just go inside."

  "I need a shower, can't we do this later?"

  "It won't take long."

  Lenise sighs and unlocks the door and he follows her inside and glances around. The sketch of a lion she had picked up at a Jo'Burg market seems to interest him and he goes close to study it.

  "Africa?"

  "Yes."

  "I've always wanted to go."

  "They have airplanes for that now. What's this about?"

  From his pocket, he takes out a pen and a black notebook and flips through it.

  "Jennifer Blake told me about that night. How you helped when he came after them," he says, eyes on his notes.

  Lenise tries to maintain her composure. "What about it?"

  "It was kind of you. Dangerous even," he says, without looking up.

  "I couldn't exactly turn them away."

  He flips through his notebook until he reaches a blank page. "You see him after that?"

  "The husband?"

  He nods.

  "Once or twice, maybe. I can't remember. Who cares?"

  "He's missing."

  "Ha! More likely gone on to terrorize some other poor, unsuspecting woman."

  Detective North pauses. "What do you think of the wife – Jennifer?"

  She looks at him. "You really want to know the truth?"

  "Sure."

  "She's weak. She needed to open her eyes and see him for what he is a long time ago. If someone ever pulled a gun on me…well…let's just say there would be consequences." She looks at her watch. "Now will that be all?"