He flicked his eyes up to the dealership’s wall-sized windows. “Did you drive here?” His voice was smooth for a biker. “Because if I see you get into a car, I’m calling the police.”
She closed one blue eye, studying the orange fire coming out of his shirt. “Aren’t you hot?”
“You didn’t answer my question.” He drummed his fingers on the counter. She saw that four knuckles on the right hand were tattooed with the letters POTA and four on the left TO×2.
She tried to straighten her back, and her blonde hair swung to the side. “I went to the dentist and got a root canal. He gave me gas and then some pills. I don’t drink.” She threw out an arm and let it slap down on her thigh, thinking this movement was cute. Some actress had done that in a movie. Then she took a step sideways as if stepping into a skiff and again grabbed at the counter.
“You have a cell?” he asked.
She tried to roll her eyes but that made her dizzy. “Of course.”
“Call a cab.”
She focused on his face, trying to imagine what kind of person he was. Evaluation was hard for her. In all of her schooling she was taught to accept others no matter what their appearance. She was a modern girl, totally purged of the ability to discriminate. The in thing was to ignore all the signals, putting dark glasses on the brain, as one civics teacher told her in high school. He was her first husband, a skinny, pale guy with a tattoo of a cantaloupe on what there was of his right biceps. When she asked him what the cantaloupe meant, he told her it was a satire of Catholic marriage rules. “You know,” he told her, “you can’t elope.” Eventually he was fired from his teaching job, and he left her for an eleventh grader. When she divorced him, she wrote on one of the legal forms, “I didn’t know who he was.”
“Okay, already.” She slapped a phone against her ear, lowered her head, and walked out the side door of the dealership. Sue floated across the parking lot and around the back of the building, feeling the Louisiana heat light up her skull, not with illumination but with a sick, feverish wanderlust, and her ears began to pop. She forgot what she was supposed to do, got into her little bubblegum-colored car, and drove out toward the highway, slamming a passenger-side tire up over a curb. She felt like a fifteen-year-old learning to drive. She knew what she wanted the car to do, but her reflexes had turned adolescent on her. Pulling into a McDonald’s, she got a cup of coffee from a trembling tattooed child behind the counter, and her vision began to regulate somewhat. In a booth she watched Fox, and her aching molar began to rage like the waif blonde anchor-girl hollering out against the Democrats. Finally, no longer able to stand the pain, she reached into her sequined purse for another of Dr. Lew’s pills. The coffee was cold when the trembling child woke her up.
“You can’t sleep here.” She backed up after she said this.
“I wasn’t sleeping.”
“If you want to stay here, you have to at least buy a pie.”
“What?” The room spun a quarter turn and the girl began to blur. “Okay. Bring me a couple.”
“Yes ma’am,” the child said, who suddenly seemed just skinny, maybe twenty years old, with runny eyes. “How many do you want?”
“A couple.”
The child’s voice vibrated with panic. “How many is that?”
Sue found her keys and walked out the west entrance to look for her car. When she found it on the other side of the building, she tried to start it with a house key. Backing out and moving toward the highway, she had to guess at right or left, and then the yellow lines, dotted lines, double lines, lane arrows, and traffic lights began to compete for her attention. A mile down the four-lane she sensed some type of aerial fire behind her. She could feel it like a stove element left on in a dark kitchen. When she checked the rearview she saw it was a policeman, but she couldn’t imagine he was after her and kept driving. Then came the siren, loud and chirping, and she drove off the road onto the shoulder and a little bit beyond into a bank of thistles and almost into a canal.
She saw that the policeman was old-school. He had a crown of gray hair surrounding a field of shiny skin, and his gut docked against her window while she tried to remember how to lower it. In a brief moment of what she hoped was clarity, she knew she had to be friendly, logical, and not say anything, anything at all, that would indicate she was impaired. She would think up the exact right thing to say. She found the button and opened up to him with a smile.
He stooped and stuck his head through the window, a big silvery head covered with old red skin and nests of broken capillaries. He looked at her eyes and smelled her like a hound.
“You drinkin’?” he asked.
Her mind went blank.
—
At the station she was put in the drunk tank with a three-hundred-pound red-haired woman wearing tattooed makeup so poorly done that her eye sockets flamed with copper fire. She’d been trying to talk to Sue for half an hour. “My uncle was a cop in North Carolina,” she prattled. “In that state they come after drunk drivers with three spikes and a hammer. One time my uncle testified against a eight-time repeat offender who’d chugged a pint of Early Times and drove off into the side of a school bus, killing two children. The local jury didn’t even leave the box, found him guilty, and then voted for the death penalty before breaking for lunch. The next month an appeal judge reduced the penalty to 251 years, but somebody kilt him the second day he was in the penitentiary.”
Sue sat on a metal bench and put her head in her hands, her mind full of smoke. “I don’t drink,” she whined.
The big woman sat back against the cinder-block wall, regarded Sue for signals, and huffed. “And I eat hummin’bird tongues for breakfast,” she said.
Sue doubled over on the bench. “My tooth hurts so much.”
“Why’nt you go to the dentist?”
“I did. I went to an endodontist and got a root canal.”
“Let me see.” The redhead stood up, the fat on her arms billowing.
“What?”
“I had a sister-in-law that used to work for a dentist. She told me all about it. Sometimes I’d go to the office with her and just watch. That dentist was a jackleg and couldn’t handle a electric screwdriver, much less a drill goin’ into a human head. Just let me see.”
Sue opened her mouth and the woman slid a forefinger inside her left cheek, a surprisingly professional movement.
“I mighta guessed,” she said. “Did he tell you the number of the tooth that needed the canal?”
“It was number five.”
“Yep. Well, he drilled number five all right, but there’s a gum abscess the size of a sweet pea next to number four.”
“Jeez, and they took my pain pills.”
“The problem with some pain pills is they make you stupid. Just remember that.” The redhead rocked herself up and was let out by a guard.
The little jailer was paternal. “Now Marcie, the chief says we can let you out again. But you got to stop shooting those squirrels in the city limits with your twenty-two.”
The big woman made a face. “Jeff, you know how much those first-class birdseed cakes cost? The little tree rats tear one apart in fifteen minutes.”
He leaned into her. “You’d best switch to a pellet rifle. They don’t make no noise.”
Sparks flying in her vision, Sue lifted her head and yelled, “My brother-in-law binds an ear of corn to a spring-loaded skeet flinger.”
The jailer cocked his head. “What’s that do?”
“He puts a solenoid on the trigger and sits on the porch with a remote control. When the squirrel jumps on the corn, the flinger throws the little bastard over the house.”
The redhead stared at her as she backed into the hall, and the jailer slammed the drunk tank door.
Sue Pistola, at times like this, times not particularly rare for her, wished she really had a brother-in-law to pal around with. She didn’t even have a sister and had never seen her father, a person she felt closer to than her screamer of a mo
m. She’d wondered about the man from the day she realized he wasn’t in her house. Throughout her childhood, his absence was a constant presence. She’d once heard he was somewhere in east Texas, so when the Louisiana job opened up near the border, she imagined she could go look for him when she wasn’t at the fire-truck factory where she worked as an electrician.
It’d been two years since she had run away from her mother, who lived deep in western Canada. Her first day in the town of Grand Crapaud, Sue had picked up a Condé Nast magazine at the realtor’s office that made Louisiana sound as exotic as the Amazon. After a few weeks she got used to the stinking alligators in the drainage ditch behind her apartment building and learned to cold-cock the nutrias that came up into her tiny backyard at night to gnaw at the few flowers she’d planted. The armadillos she found to be exotic but not when they tumbled her garbage can into the street. The big swamp she drove through to get to the fire-truck factory was otherworldly, all right, like a nightmare filled with snakes and mildewed turtles tangled in plastic six-pack holders.
She heard a noise and looked up to see her arresting officer tapping a clipboard on the bars. “We’re checking out your doctor right now,” he said. “Did he give you a prescription you got filled, or did he give you the pills himself?” The cop was so broad that his lungs were having trouble keeping up with the rest of him. She imagined he was a busy man, maybe the only traffic enforcer in this little town.
“He just gave me a bottle of them.”
The officer nodded his huge head. “Yep. His nurse kind of let slip he rolls his own.” The cop looked at the floor and grabbed the bars. “How’s your head. You know where you are?”
“I’m clearing up, but my tooth’s killing me.”
“You want to call anybody?”
“What, like a lawyer or bail bondsman?”
“We’ll tell you in a little while. I was thinkin’ a friend.”
She remembered Gladys, who lived forty miles away, and Fred, the headlight and siren man, but he didn’t own a car. “I’m kind of unconnected down here.”
“Gotcha.” He walked back through the hall and the building shrunk around him, the door not possibly big enough for him to fit through.
She lay back on a bunk and drifted off. At some point the jailer ushered in an old woman who looked as if she had lived in a drain pipe for ten years. Her hair was gray and filthy, she had two missing front teeth, and her backbone was a crescent. Her whole being was a toothache, and Sue was so sorry for the woman’s obvious poverty and low station in life that the throbbing in her jaw seemed to fade. “How you doing, lady?” Sue asked.
The old woman picked up her head. “Oh, all right, considering I just crashed my husband’s new Mercedes into the Fifth Street canal.”
Around six o’clock the jailer turned up and reported that someone had agreed to vouch for her, and they were releasing her to him. Down the hall, she saw the good-looking clerk from the Harley dealership and thought she was still drugged.
“Can I take you somewhere?” he said. “They’re about to cut you loose.”
She sat up and squinted at him from her bunk. “Why are you here?”
“I turned you in. I feel responsible. Just a bit, anyway.”
The big policeman came down the hall. “When your head clears later this week, we’ll need to talk to you about your endodontist.”
She could remember his badge—Sydney Babineaux. “You’ll give me my painkillers back?”
“Nope. We havin’ them checked out.”
“I don’t want to cause him any trouble.”
“If there’s trouble, he’ll have brought it on himself. Meanwhile, this fella can drive you home in his truck.” The officer grabbed a section of steel grate, then paused and looked at her a long time, as if he’d known her a dozen years before and was trying to place when and where. Then he turned the key to the drunk tank.
—
On the way to her apartment she made the Harley clerk stop at the liquor store.
“Well, well, I thought you said you didn’t drink,” he said.
She shrugged. “My memory just came back.”
“You don’t have any more pills in you, do you?”
“They took ’em away, I said.” She stepped out on the sticky asphalt melting before the Mirage Liquor Store, went in, and came out carrying a bottle of vodka by the neck. It felt like a dead chicken in her hand, and she thought of her mother, the part-time farmer, who’d taught her to kill a yard bird and pluck it like a banjo. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Percy.”
Her mouth fell open. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-eight. Why?”
“What parent in the last seventy years named their kid Percy?”
He pulled away from the curb slowly. “Could be worse.”
“What could be worse than Percy?”
“Leslie. Hazel.”
She thought about this and looked at his big shoulders and biceps. “What do the other bikers say about it?”
“What makes you think I’m a biker?”
At her apartment, she turned to him at the door. “I’m not going to have sex with you.”
He didn’t miss a beat. “Good. My wife would be really pissed if you did.”
They went into her stuffy living room, and she fixed herself a drink, giving him the glass of water he asked for. Then they sat on the sofa.
“I’m sorry it’s so hot in here,” she said. “The AC needs work.”
He drained his glass in one pull, put it on a rickety side table, and turned to her. “You shouldn’t drink and drive around,” he said.
She banged the backs of her hands on her thighs. “I know, I know. I took the pills the dentist gave me and they didn’t do the job, so I floated them on a drink or two.” She looked at him. “It was a mistake, okay?” He was sweating and she couldn’t stop the urge to put a finger on his neck’s flame tattoo. It smudged.
“Yikes.” She jerked her hand back.
He looked down at her finger. “It’s just one of those transfer tattoos I wear on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The customers dig it.”
She glanced at his knuckles and saw the POTATO×2 was gone. “You only work two days a week?”
“My father owns the business. I’m his partner. Got to look the part. But I know about bikes. All about them. I just don’t ride one.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because when I was a kid and whining for one, my mother said okay, but that I had to carry a spatula everywhere I rode. I asked her why, and she said so someone could use it to scrape me off the pavement.”
Sue got a chill and took a swallow of her vodka and seven. “I’m okay now. Um, I’ll probably just go to sleep and get up and call Dr. Lew.”
“Glad to hear that.” He stood, and he was even taller than she thought. “Just stay off the juice when you’re on the road. I don’t want you crashing through our display window.”
She found it hard to take her eyes off him. “What do you do the days you don’t work?”
“I volunteer with Habitat for Humanity. Sundays I’m a deacon at Mass.”
She threw up her hands, let them fall. “Man, I sure got you wrong.” She took another swig and pointed at his hair. “What do your church buddies think about your Fabio do?”
He threw back his head and shook out his shiny locks. “The biker chicks like it.” He smiled down at her. “How about you?” he asked, reaching up and giving the top of his hair a jerk. He pulled off a shimmering wig, held it in front of his chest, and then bowed to show an even buzz cut.
—
The next morning she woke up to flaming jaw pain and a white-hot anger toward Dr. Lew. His nurse said she could have an appointment in an hour. Sue couldn’t eat breakfast and wondered if he would try to charge her for a second root canal. She also wondered what was in the pills he’d given her, if maybe they were some kind of date-rape drug. She made herself a vodka and tonic, washed down two pain
pills she’d found wrapped in tinfoil in her jewelry box, and before going out the door she put her little .25 automatic in her baggy jeans.
Dr. Lew’s office was modest and dingy, only one chair next to a window. The curtains were held open by chains made from old linked pull tabs.
He came in wearing a vintage dentist’s smock, buttoned up the right side of the breast with fourteen faux ivory buttons. He was around seventy years old, with a thin splatter of silver hair. “Hi, sweetie. Francine tells me you’re having trouble.”
Sue gave him a pout. “My tooth hurts like hell because you worked on the wrong one.”
Dr. Lew polished his little mirror on his smock. “Well, now, that’s impossible, sweetie. But I checked your X-rays, and I did miss a small abscess on the neighbor tooth, so we might have to do that one as well.” He unrolled his long fingers. “Let’s see.”
“And you gave me some capsules you made up yourself that about drove me nuts.”
Dr. Lew straightened up and held his hands close to his chest like an erect rat. “Those painkillers give you some sweet dreams, don’t they?”
“They messed me up.” She tugged at her bib. “Are you gonna charge me twice?”
He gave the air two quick sniffs, just like her childhood pet rat, Mr. Squeakum, used to do. “Well, a new procedure will mean a new bill.”
Sue started to say she wouldn’t pay it, then remembered she could just ask to be billed in the mail and then ignore the charge. As if reading her thoughts, Dr. Lew proceeded to give her a hard stick in her palate and a couple more farther back. When he pulled the needle out, she cursed him. He decided to give her some gas and, minutes later, a pill, and then he went to work.
—
She felt herself come out of the fog slowly and angrily. Though her lips were heavy as lead, she managed to cry out that he was the Osama bin Laden of endodontists. Like most veteran doctors, he was impervious to insult, but he seemed stung by the comment. He put his hand on her shoulder and pressed down. “You shouldn’t talk to me like that, young lady.”
Sue tasted blood in her mouth and dreaded the time when the lidocaine would fade. Her consciousness began to slip again, and she wondered what else Dr. Lew could have done when she was totally out. She squirmed, then imagined that her bra was unhooked, so she reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out her little pistol. “Get your hands off me, you old lech.” The gun wavered between them, went off, and so did Dr. Lew’s light.
Signals Page 32