"You know I'm a civilian," Sam said.
"Sure you are buddy, but stuff like this runs in your blood. Go with God and get the fuck out of here. I still love you, but we can't have none of that Henry shit down here."
"Glad to see we agree on something."
Sam nodded and handed over the roll of bills. Lydia took off to waves all around. They cruised down an overcrowded thoroughfare toward the ocean and the highway. Not until Sam pointed her onto the southbound main road, did Lydia start to frame all the questions running amok in her mind.
"Are you sure that was wise telling him about the boat?"
Sam shrugged. "I had to know if there was a buzz about it—obviously there is—but Rique's no risk. He's not telling anyone anything, not about me." Sam took the silver revolver out of the sack and slid it under Lydia's seat.
"What do you expect me to do with that?"
"You think I can handle a gun in my condition? Besides, you're the shooter babe around here."
Lydia ignored the backhand vote of confidence and pestered Sam with one unanswered question after another. She couldn't help herself. Quite apart from the situation, this was a less than attractive part of him she had never seen, all criminal buddy talk and euphemism. Finally, Sam sighed and confessed, "We've been friends since we were kids. When Rique first got started in the supply business, I helped him out with some quality control issues."
"Is that gangster talk too, or are you being facetious?"
"Hardly. I was never in the business, and these things were out of my range. I brought Donny and Mischa into it, and they fixed the issue for Rique and found other things for him to do besides. He never forgot the debt."
"You're not telling me anything, are you?"
"I certainly hope not. Anyway, don't worry. We're the aggrieved party here, and everybody will see it that way. All Rique wanted to know was, if I was going to cause any trouble over the boat."
"But then why did he give you the gun?"
"In case I changed my mind."
Chapter 32
The Jeep drove slowly into the settlement, Tommy trying to connect this burgeoning little town to the dusty outpost he claimed to remember. "The restaurant's over there somewhere," he said with a finger pointed left at most of Mexico. "None of this was here before. I don't think, anyway."
He took off down a dusty sidetrack through the usual collection of decrepit shacks, half-built houses, and abandoned cars and boats. Sheri glanced across a chicken coop and a field at what might have been a clinic. Unusually clean glass windows with white blinds and a small, neat parking lot—and a sign that said Clinica. Duh, how dumb could she get? She pointed Tommy right and they came back out to the highway and slowly cruised past.
Outside, in the clinic's parking lot, sat a shiny new blue BMW, an incongruous sight in this dusty, backward little town with its beat-up vans, gringo trucks, and off-road dune buggies. The sight of the BMW nagged at Sheri until, by the time they were sitting down in the El Rosario Café to eat, she decided that the owners had to be outsiders. Drug dealers probably. Gangsters looking for the three hijackers they had left behind to pilot a ruined sailing yacht into harbor. Tommy ordered the house special, a trio of lobster tacos Baja-style, and Sheri nodded along mechanically. The last thing she wanted was food, but at least the stop would give her time to think. Something told her that, one way or another, she had reached the end. Of something.
But then, with her third lobster taco half in her mouth, she glanced out the dirty restaurant window and couldn't believe her eyes. She missed the rich, red sauce dripping down her chin onto her t-shirt, even when Mike handed her an urgently needed paper towel. "What?" Mike asked, but she hardly heard him. Outside in the parking lot, the blue gangster BMW she had spotted outside the clinic opened its passenger door and let out an old, bald geezer with a bad leg.
Sheri dropped the taco and leapt out of the booth. She crashed through the door and outside, just as Lydia emerged from the other side of the car. "Lydia!" she screamed. She raced across the parking lot and slammed the older woman into the car, wrapping her arms around her, shrieking out her name over and over. Lydia laughed and tried to get control of the girl, but she wasn't letting go. Never, ever, ever. "Oh my God!" she shouted. "Oh my God! I love you! I love you!"
Finally, Sheri let Lydia pry her hands loose, but no sooner had they separated, than she leapt into her again. "Easy," Lydia soothed her. Sheri heard her voice, but couldn't help it. She hung on, knowing for a fact that the instant she let go, Lydia would vanish in the glare of the desert sun. She had to be a hallucination.
Sheri felt Sam's hand on her back too, the two of them patting and murmuring and coaxing her back from the dead. Finally, she found the courage to face them. "Thank you," she said, wiping the tears off Lydia's blouse. "Thank you." It was all she could think to say.
Lydia laughed. "Don’t thank me. This has been the Sam Spaulding show all the way."
Sheri turned to the old man to squeeze his hand. The touch brought home to her how much more frail he looked than she remembered. Maybe it was the vanished hair and the pasty complexion. He was a walking dead version of the man who had trashed Rudy that day in the studio. He responded awkwardly to her clasp, but didn't draw away.
"Don't be ridiculous," he said to Lydia, then to Sheri, "Come on. Let's go back in and eat. They won't have Rudy ready to discharge for another hour."
Whereupon Sheri threw up her rich lobster breakfast all over him.
The next hour or two were a blur for Sheri. Sam or Lydia—she wasn't sure which—insisted on getting a hotel room to sluice the desert stink off her and let Sam change his clothes. The boys Tommy and Mike were disappointed to find themselves cast aside as surfer knights, but Sam talked to them, man to men, tough-guy style, and they drove off, happy and proud. Sam seemed to have a handle on everything, not a bit like the pompous, self-centered asshole Sheri remembered. It was only as they were getting ready to go back to the clinic, that she spotted him sitting on the bed, gazing vacantly into the shadows in the corner of the room, and realized just how sick he really was. She followed Lydia's lead and pretended not to notice. She knew nothing about these things, but the reluctantly kind old bastard was in serious trouble.
Outside the clinic doors, Lydia finally caught up with the panic that had been rising in Sheri for the last hour. Sheri had come this far, been through so much just to reach this point. So why was she so utterly terrified?
"Don't worry about Rudy," Lydia said with a massage of her back to sooth her. "He doesn't look all that great, but he's going to be fine. You're both going to be fine."
But it was herself Sheri worried about. Selfish it might have been, but if Rudy didn't recognize her, if he didn't smile and take her in his arms, if he didn't love her the way she had built it up the last four days, just to keep going, she would die.
But in the end, the reunion was all so wonderfully anti-climactic. Rudy—she could hardly stand to think his name—sat lolling half-asleep in a wheelchair outside the doctor's office, waiting for them to pick him up. When Sheri went to him, he glanced up dreamily, smiled, and said, "Sheri, you made it. I knew you would." And fell back asleep. Sheri gingerly petted his shoulder, afraid to hug him, lest she break something. He was all there and as real as any human being. She ran her hand through his hair and caught the lanced blisters on his well-oiled red face. But none of that mattered.
She glanced up at the others and saw the doctor waiting in his office door, impatient and unhappy. Sam nodded and led the way inside. They all crowded into the tiny room with the bare desk and empty walls.
"I gave him a sedative," the doctor said to Sam in an excellent foreigner's English. "He will sleep most of the way. He is still suffering from the effects of the dehydration, but otherwise he should be fine. Get him to another doctor as soon as you reach Los Angeles."
"Thank you," Sam said. He reached into the backpack Sheri had handed him when he asked how much money she had left.
The doctor was still talking. "You have put us in a difficult position here, Señor. As I told you, the police have been making inquiries."
"I understand," Sam said. "But this isn't the first time a patient miraculously recovered and walked out on his own."
"No, I suppose..." But the doctor trailed off at the sight of the two thick wads Sam laid on the desk.
"Our donation to the hospital. Twenty thousand American dollars should help buy the used x-ray machine we were talking about, no?"
"Oh yes," the doctor agreed, mollified. He led the way out to the car and helped them ease Rudy into the back seat, then quickly disappeared back inside, as they climbed in and took off.
"Six hours to the border," Sam said from the front passenger seat before he nodded off. Sheri gazed across at the slumbering Rudy, his head falling off his shoulders. She tried to move him around, to make him more comfortable, but his leaden limbs were too heavy for her much too tentative grasp. She finally settled for fondling his arm, and got a vague smile and a nod in return. She took both of his hands and held them and leaned into him. He might smell like a hospital, but he was definitely her Rudy.
But not the Rudy Sheri had once so thoughtlessly pigeonholed. For the first time, Sheri knew all of the way down in her soul, that the two of them were going to be okay, and not just alive and breathing, but okay with each other. Something had welded them together, once and for all. And even though they were still in Mexico, she felt herself relax for the first time in days. So much so that, when she leaned her head against Rudy's chest to listen for his heartbeat, she promptly forgot everything and passed out.
Chapter 33
Somewhere along the way, Sheri woke to the gravely rumble of Sam's voice. She came out of her reverie to find him talking to a soldier at a checkpoint, nodding behind him at Rudy and laughing about gringos, el sol, and mariscos. He repeated the same story at the border, when an hour in line brought them up to the booth and the clean-cut young man in the military-style United States uniform. With no papers for the sleeping wrecks in the back seat, the border agent had to wave them over to the inspection station, but even there, everyone played it friendly. No doubt Sam helped things along, when he asked the agent to help him out of the car and made him wait, embarrassed, while he adjusted his colostomy bag. Or maybe it was Lydia with her wonderful southern belle manners and her beautiful, couldn't-hurt-a-flea smile. But before Sheri surfaced the rest of the way from her groggy depths, they were through immigration and cruising out of San Diego on the blessed, gorgeous, perfect California highway.
"Anyone hungry?" Lydia asked at one point, just before Oceanside and the Marine base. It was late in the afternoon, and they hadn't stopped except for gas. Sam grunted something between a yes and a no, but Sheri realized that Lydia had read her mind.
"Starving," she said, and it was true.
But the best part came after an odd five-second delay, when the apparition next to her gurgled, "Gimme a fucking hamburger," and set them all to bursts of nervous laughter. Sam turned and glanced back to find both of them more or less alert. He handed over a plastic green sack and said, "We bought it in Ensenada on the way down. For Rudy."
Sheri dove into the sack and took out the still boxed camera. "Look Rudy!" she said. An inexplicable wave of relief crashed over her. She turned over the astonishing box in her hands and pressed it into Rudy's. He was listening to Sam, vague and half-asleep, but still getting it.
"I wouldn't send it into the manufacturer for repairs," Sam was saying. "But it's the real thing. Damn good lens too."
Rudy nodded, visibly overwhelmed by the gesture. Tears leaked out of his eyes as he closed them. For no reason she could think of, Sheri found herself crying too. She glanced away from Rudy and saw Lydia in the front seat crying along as well. All of the weeping made no sense and all the sense in the world. Lydia's hand reached across to her husband's leg, but the dying old tough guy just shrugged, embarrassed at getting caught in the act of behaving like a prince, and gazed out his window.
An hour later, they came to the 405 junction, with signs pointing off to the South Bay. Lydia flipped on her signal to exit for the beach cities and home, but Sam stopped her with a hand.
"Stay on the five," he said.
"But—"
"Stay on the five," he repeated, and they set off toward downtown Los Angeles. Lydia said nothing more. Sheri caught the slow build of tension in the front seat, as they cruised up out of Orange County. At the Slauson exit, just outside downtown in City of Commerce, they got off and headed west into the industrial wasteland. Shuttered auto plants, empty warehouses, and abattoirs gave way to endless tracts of faceless post-war bungalows darkened for the night. Sam's uneasy voice fed directions down one boulevard and another, until signs told Sheri they were entering South Gate. By now, Lydia and Sam were both frowning, their faces jagged with anxiety.
Sam guided them along what might have once been a bustling main street in a working class neighborhood, before the urban nightmare swallowed it up. They turned into one residential street and off that into a cul de sac littered with uncollected trash and half-dead cars. At the end, just before a line of railroad tracks, Lydia pulled into a driveway next to a dark hulk of a sad, untended two-story house. Sheri looked out the window. The yard beyond the chain link fence was all weeds, the broken porch littered with the washed out dregs of junk mail and soggy newspapers. Neither Sam nor Lydia moved an inch.
"It looks nice," Sheri lied with no trace of enthusiasm, but no one was paying any attention to her anyway.
"Well?" Lydia asked. "Are we going in?"
"Where are we?" Sheri asked, this time breaking through.
"His mother's house," Lydia sighed. "The place he grew up in."
Sheri glanced out the window again. It all looked so ... dead. Sam opened his door but sat there in the silence, hard and poker-faced, one reluctant leg out on the gravel drive. Lydia turned back to Sheri's puzzled gaze. "Some things we need to talk about," she said, and left it at that.
Part IV
Lydia
Chapter 34
Lydia was crouching on the bank of the crick in the treeless Kentucky holler when the panic hit her. All the other defenders, men and women, had fled. Sam was down on his knees, threading bits of string fuse into what she hoped were crates of explosives. He was working much too slow and methodically. If he didn't immediately climb to his feet and take her away from there, they were both going to die. "Sam!" she shouted, but he didn't hear her. Tiny knots in bits and pieces of string consumed him.
Lydia glanced across the crick and up the hill over the lifeless stubble of the tobacco field. And saw them coming. Huge, ungainly, tank-like vehicles cresting the ridge, with the refracted rays of the sun exploding around them. Massive warriors in camouflage—even at this distance Lydia could spot the ranks of angry, violent, much too gorgeous Smullens—trampling down the red earth slope, headed straight for her. And for Sam who refused to look up.
Finally, Lydia wrenched her husband to his feet, and he towered over her, brave, beautiful, and indestructible. But instead of fleeing, Sam hauled up her floral-print dress and ripped off her panties! Right there, right then, ignoring her cries of fear. He picked up and mounted her on him, flinging her up and down wildly, until she couldn't help it. She gave in, knotted her hands around his neck, and dug her heels into the backs of his beautiful knees. Sam lifted her, his huge hands gripping her quivering thighs, and plunged her up and down. She climaxed, and he came right after her, in an explosion of a thousand tiny, white droplets.
Except when they sank to the ground, heaving, exhausted, afraid for each other all over again, the cloud of droplets turned into a spray of sweet, sickly, clear brown whiskey bubbles. And Lydia woke up in a near-empty gym in San Pedro and leapt to her feet in shock at the circle of expectant faces.
"Hi, everybody," she said in a rush. "My name is Lydia, and I'm an alcoholic."
She rubbed her eyes and glanced around the group. Sh
e could tell they were surprised to see her. Apparently, they had written her off, like so many other mislaid souls before her, as a loser in the poisonous battle. When she first arrived tonight, she had sensed them all wanting to sniff her for the skin- and tongue-sweated aroma of the ugly brown monster. But at least in this session, she no longer found a ring of sad, wounded refugees from a distant war beyond her ken. For the first time, she was hunkered down right here with them—when she wasn't lost in some recurring nightmare she only dimly understood.
"I don't care if he dies," she finally blurted. That threw them, but she didn't instantly launch into a blather of self-exculpation, like she might have on another night. "I love him, but he once told me something his brother said about going out with his boots on, and I get it now, cliché or not. Dignity matters to my husband. It matters more than whether he keeps me happy by living another twenty-four hours. It'll break my heart, but when his time comes, I hope I have the courage to let him go out the way he wants."
The group stared up at her like she was some euthanasia-talking alien. Wrapped up in their midlife struggles, they just didn't get how the game looked from the two-minute warning onward. All except—bizarrely—for the young middle-class boy hoodlum Johnny, who gaped up at Lydia like she was a tongues-speaking angel at a holy-roller prayer meeting under a tent in the Kentucky bluegrass hills.
"But didn't you tell us he was in remission?" Group Leader Bob pleaded. He especially didn't get her thinking. His business was hope, and he mistakenly thought he was hearing something different. Lydia could see how Bob thought the word remission actually meant something, and almost felt sorry for him.
"For the last ten years I've despised change," Lydia admitted. "Feared it, fought it, drank myself into a stupor to avoid it. But we're all in remission, we're all out of remission, it doesn't mean a damn thing. Words like that only matter until you wake up one morning and the subject is you. A thousand perfectly healthy people will die crossing streets before my Sam's time comes. Once the cancer gene shows its face, you realize it's no longer a matter of when, but how."
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