by Jack Tunney
How can I leave him?
I’m not leaving him if he’s been taken away from me.
Maybe Ben can…
Maybe…
She kept the tears at bay until New Rochelle. They didn’t stop until Chicago.
SECOND FALL
DECATUR, ILLINOIS, 1956
“Why are you doing this to yourself, honey? Seriously.”
“I don’t know.” Vicky pushed a fry through the mound of ketchup on her plate. “It’s kinda fun.”
“Fun?” Martin sneered across the booth at Vicky’s giggle. “How is this fun, Vee? You’re getting bounced around like a drunk’s wife. And they never let you win.”
Vicky dismissed him with her fry. “That’s not what it’s about.” She popped it in her mouth. “Told you that before.”
“What’s it about then?” Martin sat back in the booth, drummed eight pearly fingertips on the table. “Getting beat up for money?”
“Pretend beat up.” Vicky’s face hardened. “And what the hell’s that mean?”
“Nothing.” Martin showed his palms. “Doesn’t mean a thing. Just…” He gestured at Vicky, hunched and small in the booth, still in her leopard print mini-dress with the short legs sewn into it. “I don’t get this.”
“I know you don’t.” She went for another fry. “You don’t have to.”
“Good. Because I don’t.” Martin looked at what remained of his Greek salad and dismissed it with a wave. He pulled himself into the corner of the booth and propped an elbow on the table, his head on his hand. “Are you still coming to the opening?”
“Of course.” Vicky swept up the last of the ketchup with the third to last fry and sat back. She’d kept her elbows below her shoulders the entire time they’d been in the diner. She smirked at him. “When is it again?”
Martin rolled his eyes. “Saturday. Two weeks from tonight.” He threw the smirk back at her. “And I can hear my phone ringing a half hour after it starts now.”
“No, no.” She folded her arms below her tightly wrapped breasts. “I’ll be there.” Her gaze wandered from the booth. “I could certainly use the money.”
“I’m not touching that.” Martin sat up, showed a palm. “I don’t know why you insist on baiting me.”
“Tonda?”
A boy of about 12 stood at his father’s hip between the diner’s glass front door and their booth. The kid stared at Vicky, tugging the man’s sleeve. Both were dressed entirely in stiff fabrics. “Hey, Pop. It’s Tonda from the wrestling matches.”
Martin extended an arm across the table at the boy as if to hold him at bay. Vicky just stared at the kid.
“Now, see here, young man.” Martin pushed at the air between them. “You’ve made a mistake. This isn’t…”
“Yeah.” The man patted his son’s shoulder while glancing round the diner. “Leave these folks alone.” He looked into the booth. “Sorry, he gets excited. We just come from the matches.”
Martin looked across the booth. Vicky tucked her hair behind her ear, fully exposing her scar to the man and boy, who jumped and pointed. “Hot dog! It is Tonda, Pop. I told you.” He looked sidelong at Martin’s crested blue jacket and pocket square and spoke from one side of his mouth. “But that guy ain’t no Mammoth Malloy.”
Behind the counter, the night waitress wandered from the kitchen. “Oh, sorry, folks.” She gestured at the several empty booths along the front windows and far wall. “Anywhere you like.”
But the man was squinting at Vicky. “So, you’re really…”
“I’ll tell you who this guy is.” Vicky was all teeth and nails as she sneered at the boy. “This here is Dr. Clive Kronenberg. He runs a zoo for rare animals in Zimbabwe. You know what he’s going to do?”
The boy shook his head, agape.
Martin did too. “What…what am I…?”
“He’s gonna take the blood from a red mountain rhinoceros and inject it into Mammoth and me so’s we’ll never get beat by no one ever again.”
The boy swallowed.
“So watch what I do to that cowgirl, or any other gal who steps into the ring with me now.” Vicky leaned out of the booth at the boy, scar first, her voice a ragged whisper. “That ring is my domain.”
His gaze still riveted to Vicky, the boy’s hand searched for his father’s. “Pop…?”
Martin blinked, licked his lips. “Uh…”
The boy gripped his father’s hand by three fingers and they looked at each other. “We gotta see that, Pop? Can we?”
The father, his face slack, looked from his son to Vicky, who had pulled her feet from her flats and coiled her legs next to her on the booth bench. Careful to keep her elbows close to her sides to prevent the ache in the back of her neck from spiking, she tossed her auburn hair so it fell in a perfect cascade over her scar and one eye. She teased the leopard print an inch further up her thigh with her fingers and blinked up at the man. “Can we? Pop?”
The man blinked and swallowed. He made vague pushes at the boy’s shoulders. “Yeah, sure we can, pal.” He slid the boy past the booth, staring at Vicky’s legs and pout. “Sure we can. Let’s go sit.”
“Yippee!” The boy swung a fist in the air. “Mountain rhino blood. What do ya think it’ll do to her, Pop? Think it’ll give her a horn? I can’t wait to see.”
Vicky swung her legs back under the table as soon as the man’s back was turned. “Well, that’s two tickets sold.” She giggled. “Maybe more.”
Martin shook his head. “Is there even such a thing as a red mountain rhinoceros?”
“No idea. Doubt it.” Vicky watched the man guide the boy to a booth near the restrooms. “I’ll tell you why they needed to sit down, dear old dad was growing a horn.” She pushed her feet back into her shoes. “Oh, come on.” She tilted her head at Martin. “What?”
His head kept shaking, a flipped palm his only reply.
Vicky smiled. She leaned over the table at him, hands folded. “In my last picture I played a hat check girl. Know how many scenes I was in? One. Know how many shots I was in? Three. I was in focus in one of them. I had one line. I said, ‘Right away, sir’ to Bruce Cabot.” She grinned big at him.
“I don’t get it.”
“You don’t have to, darling.”
The waitress arrived from taking an order from the boy and his pop. “How was everything, folks?”
“Great.” Vicky grinned at Martin.
“Get you anything else?”
Martin shook his head at Vicky. “I’d like the check.”
Vicky smiled up at the waitress. “He’d like the check. Please.”
***
Her week-old encounter with the boy and his father at the diner still made Vicky smile, but it was fleeting as she looked in the mirror to make sure she was once again ready for public consumption.
Her hair curled into a tight swoop over her scar and one eye, she smoothed her simple cotton dress over her hips, which it didn’t particularly crowd, left the smelly ladies’ room and forced herself back onto the sales floor. She passed the travel section, where a fat young couple contemplated an atlas, and turned right onto the worn, patched hardwood path to customer service.
A spectacled, man-shaped weasel in banker’s clothes groped her with his stare over the top of A Certain Smile as she passed the romance shelves. She kept her head down, hoping to cross over near the front door to her spot behind the customer service counter, but only got as far as the fiction new releases display.
“Excuse me. Miss?”
I hate this damn name tag. Hate it so much. “Yes…?”
The woman, either forty or sixty, stood before the tall, wide display of new books like it was the doorway to an Auschwitz shower. She wagged a finger at them. “Are these the newest ones you have?”
Vicky’s spine curved in on itself. “No.”
“Oh.” The woman’s finger risked another point, this one at the bright red, block-lettered, obnoxious sign. “I thought…”
“Oh, n
ewest?” Vicky shook her head. “I thought you said something else.” She flipped a hand at the display. “Yep, those’re the newest.” She turned to escape, the sole of her ballet flat silent on the floorboards.
“What do you have that’s good?”
Noooooooooo! Vicky screamed inside her head.
“Uh.” Two heavy steps to the new release display. “What…what are you in the mood for?”
“Well.” The woman’s eyes scanned the covers far too quickly to see any of them. “It’s for my nephew’s birthday. So…”
“So.” Vicky crossed her arms, but low, kept her weight over both hips. “What does he like?”
The woman reached for something, then didn’t. “What’s the newest one?”
Since the woman hadn’t once looked directly at her, Vicky risked an eye roll and got away with it. She pointed at the four rows of hardcovers in the top center of the display. “That’s the big one that came out today, but it’s a generational saga about how cancer ravages a family, so I’m not sure…”
“What about action?”
“What…what about…?”
“He likes a lot of action.” The woman’s stiff-fingered hands shook in front of her to demonstrate the concept. “Which one of these is action?”
“Uh, well…” Vicky scanned the display. “Let’s see.”
“What about this one?” A forty-or-sixty-year-old hand snatched a book from the row of six similar titles before the nobody in the immediate area could get to it. She presented it to Vicky as a cat would a dead bird.
“Yeah.” Vicky accepted the book like it was wet. A backwoods horror paperback novella, the cover was nothing but a screaming blonde’s head trapped between a work boot and slate tile. “This has a bit more rape in it than you’re probably looking for.”
“But is it action?”
“In a way?” Vicky shrugged. The woman just stared at her. Vicky snuck the book past her and replaced it on the rack. “What about this?” She took a hardcover from the display and handed it over with a smile. “This one should be aces for a boy.”
Despite the bubble-helmeted spaceman and a robot with a head ringed in fire featured on the cover, the woman looked at the book like it had herpes. “This is action?”
“Yep.” Vicky rocked back on her heels. “And it’s a pretty keen story.”
“Alright. Thank you.” Vicky ceased to exist as the woman, staring at the book cover, shuffled toward the register where Gladys was watching down her skinny nose.
Vicky blew out a heavy sigh and turned toward customer service.
“Wait.”
The woman intercepted Vicky, shaking the book in front of her. “What does this mean, here?”
She looked where the forty-or-sixty-year-old finger pointed. “French?”
“Yes.”
“It means the author’s last name is French.”
A twisted look. “I know that. Why is it?”
A creased brow. “That’s his name. Paul French.”
“French? I didn’t know...How is my nephew going to read it?”
“Probably pretty quickly. It’s action, remember?”
“He can’t read French.”
“It’s a science fiction series for children, he shouldn’t have any, wait…what?”
“Forget it. I’ll go somewhere else. Thanks for nothing…” The woman’s eyes stabbed at the plastic tag pinned to Vicky’s chest. “Tori.” Waving the book like a picket sign, she turned away, said something with the word floozy in it, and dropped the book in a shopping basket near the door on the way out.
Vicky finally made it to customer service, noted the irony and assumed the position.
Gladys appeared at the counter, drumming her stubby, chewed nails on the glass. “You just lost me a sale.”
“She thought the guy’s name and native language were the same thing.” Vicky crossed her arms, leaned back away from the counter. “Did you really want her money?”
“Unless you’re prepared to buy the books they don’t, the customer is king.” Gladys retrieved the discarded copy of Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury from the shopping basket. “Your job is make sure the customer leaves with what she wants, Miss Archer.” She put the book back on the shelf. “That’s your job.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The tension between Vicky’s shoulder blades swelled into soreness.
Gladys shook her head and wandered toward the back of the store.
The man-shaped weasel skulked to the customer service counter with A Certain Smile in his damp hands and a smile cut across his pointy face.
“I have some questions about this book, miss.”
Vicky smiled, but only because the image of Tonda the Jungle Queen heaving Gladys into the third row filled her head.
EIGHTEEN MONTHS EARLIER
IDAHO SPRINGS, COLORADO, 1955.
Carson rolled his muscled bulk off of Vicky and settled onto his back, one leg slipping to the floor from the cramped double bed. “That…was nice.”
“Yeah.” Vicky slipped her feet under the covers and pulled them up just passed her hips. “Fun time.”
He looked at her sidelong, one forearm resting on his forehead. “Heh. Thanks.”
She rolled to her side, her head propped up on a hand, and flicked his big, fleshy bicep with a nail. “You’re welcome.”
“Yeah, I guess I do owe you one.” He rubbed his big hands over his handsome, scruffy face. “Never made it with an actress before.”
“Ex-actress.” She poked his arm. “That’s what I used to do.”
“Yeah, but…” He rolled to face her, mirroring her position on the bed. “You said you’re headed out that way to do it again, right?”
“Thinking about it.” She glanced down at his rounded gut, which was about even with his pronounced pecs. He was younger than Ben and definitely had Ben’s size, but Carson’s undefined body and leftover baby fat brought a tightness to Vicky’s chest and left her body chilled under the bed sheet. “Might go back, yeah.”
“Alright then.” He smiled big. He really was a good looking kid. “When I tell my friends about this, I’m gonna say I made it with a Hollywood actress.”
She pushed a palm into his face and giggled sort of. “If you like.”
He took her by the wrist and kissed her palm before placing her hand on his chest. His big paw had its calluses and strength, but it hadn’t been anywhere real yet.
Ben’s hands were bashed and distorted, the weapons of a warrior who fought to survive. Thinking of them curled Vicky’s toes under the bed sheet and her fingers into the hair on Carson’s chest. He smiled and reached for her face. “So, I guess they’ll have make-up out there for that scar, huh?”
“Uh.” She intercepted his hand with hers and placed it on the bed between them. “Yeah, probably.” She rolled to her back.
“Oh. I’m sorry.” He sat up. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to…”
She waved his apology away. “It’s okay.” She looked up at him. “I know you didn’t mean anything by it.”
The first thing Ben ever kissed was her scar.
Carson brought his knees up near his chest and squeezed his shaggy, tonic-filled hair in his hands. His gaze wandered the ceiling. “Yeah, uh, the directions to this place were great.” He shrugged. “Didn’t think they would be, but the inn near the statue of Steve Canyon turned out to be dead on.”
“Yeah. Everyone around here knows the statue.” She stacked her hands between her head and the pillow. “God knows what it’s doing there.”
“I don’t know, but I always loved Steve.” He folded his arms over his chest.
Steve Canyon the war hero. There was an idea.
She curled onto her side again with a kittenish smile. “Were you in Korea?”
His face wilted a bit. “No.”
“Oh.” She picked at a fold in the sheet.
“I mean, I would have gone, but Pop still got the trucking company to worry about so…he pulled some strings.
”
“Yeah, I get it.” She looked up at him, then reached over with a grin and poked him in his firm but round stomach. “Thought maybe you didn’t go because of this.”
“Oh yeah?” He brightened and slid to his side to face her. “Well, look at what you got going on here yourself.”
Giggling, he reached down with a thick thumb and forefinger and pinched the soft, round pooch below her navel.
“Get lost!” She slapped his hand away. “I had a kid, you stupid hayseed.”
She pulled the bed sheet up to her throat and sat up. Her shoulders rounded into her chest, she looked at the kid’s stunned face and reached for him. “Look, Carson…“
“You had a kid?” He pulled away from her hand. “Where’s your kid?”
“I…” She balled her hands in her lap. “I…”
He was on his feet, snatching up his clothes from the floor and trying to get back into them at the same time. He shot her a twisted-up look. “How old are you?”
She just stared at her hands.
“Well, I’ll tell you what.” He pulled his blue jeans into place and stood with his shirt open and his boots in his hand. “I may be just some fat hayseed to you, but I know where my family is at and I ain’t some cut-up, over-the-hill whore who thinks she can still be an actress.” He stomped to the door. “Good luck in Hollywood, tramp.” Boots in hand, he slammed the door behind him.
Vicky sat staring at various spots in the little rented room until the early hours of the next morning, crying only when she could feel Ben’s arms around her or see little George’s face looking up at hers. The next morning she left the inn, never looking anywhere near a mirror, and bought a ticket back to Chicago. She didn’t even set foot on the west side of the platform while she waited for the train.
Vicky only thought of her night with Carson one time after that when, almost six months to the day later, she heard his parting words in her head right after she got pinned for the first time in the middle of Wayne’s ring.
THIRD FALL