by Julia Keller
She gave him the once-over. She had to, because he would not move. He had bad skin and saggy eyes and a sackful of chins. He was ancient, Carla thought; he had to be at least fifty. He wore a tight blue sweatshirt with WVU across the front in yellow letters, and below that, in small letters: MOUNTAINEERS. He might have been wearing a belt, but it was impossible to tell because his belly flopped over the front of his jeans as if he were toting a bag of something loose and jiggly. Those jeans were so tight that Carla wondered how he moved his legs. And he wore cowboy boots.
Of course, she thought. Had to be cowboy boots. He was about as authentic a bronc buster as Garth Brooks was.
“So whaddya say?” he persisted.
“Just leave me alone, okay?”
Now he frowned. The chins wobbled, settled.
“You think you’re too good for the likes of me, that it, princess?” he said. Some preliminary menace in his tone now. He belched. She smelled the last beer he’d had.
I should have known better, Carla thought. Coming in here alone. Jesus.
She tried once more to go around him, moving again to her right. This time, he stuck out an arm.
“You gotta pay the toll,” he said. The big grin was back. “Wanna know what the toll is?”
No, she did not want to know. She had an idea, but it was too gross to contemplate. She was just about to ask him again to leave her be—more politely this time, hoping that maybe he had a streak of decency in him, although the signs were not promising—when another man stepped out of the sweaty jungle of people.
“Move along,” New Guy said, and not in a nice way. He was tall and sinewy, a lean streak of bad attitude. He did not look at Carla. His eyes were locked on Cowboy Boots.
“Make me.”
“I don’t think you want me to do that,” New Guy said. “Do you?”
Cowboy Boots got the point. He dropped his arm. He shrugged. He started to sidle away. His last official act was to glare at Carla and utter the classic bar retort, the pride-restoring words used by every man rebuffed by any woman since the beginning of time: “Goddamned dyke.”
Carla laughed. She watched Cowboy Boots melt into the crowd. By the time she turned back, New Guy was gone. She was disappointed. She wanted to thank him. Oh, well.
Nobody else bothered her. She drank a beer while standing at the bar, letting the essence of the place seep into her while she observed it. The sheer density of all the assembled bodies made it very warm in here. At first she faced the mirror, seeing nothing, not even her own reflection—the mirror was cloudy, and the room was dark. Then she turned around, elbows against the wood, and watched the people. The tightly coiled knot inside her stomach was gradually loosening. It was partly the beer, she figured. And partly the place.
This was what she had needed. A place filled with strangers, where she would be cushioned by other people. None of them knew her, and so none of them would be likely to come up and say how disappointed they were at what she had done or not done in her life. Mission accomplished. She turned back around. The bartender pointed to her empty glass. She shook her head. No, she didn’t want another.
Outside, the cold felt exceptionally good on her flushed face. She took a deep breath, appreciating the way the cold reached deep inside her chest with its icy fingers, waking her up, layer by layer. It was invigorating. She had just rounded the corner of a black Dodge Charger and was halfway to her car when she saw him: Cowboy Boots. He was leaning against a red truck at the end of the sloppy row of parked cars, lighting a cigarette.
Spotting her, he suddenly straightened up as if someone had punched him in the small of the back. He flung aside the cigarette.
“Well, well,” he called out. “Whadda we got ourselves here? Little princess don’t have her prince around no more.”
In the bar he had seemed pathetic, not scary. But here in the parking lot, it was a different story. There was no one else around. The meager light from a bulb clamped to the side of the building caused the vehicles to cast crazy purple shadows across the frozen, snow-rutted ground, and amidst the crooked striping, he radiated a kind of crazy, anything-goes menace. He laughed. His laugh was low and sharp, with no amusement in it.
Carla ignored him. She kept walking. Any minute now, she thought, somebody else will be coming out of the bar. A witness. He won’t touch me if there’s anybody else around.
No one came.
She had her keys in her right hand. She was within three feet of her car when Cowboy Boots grunted and lurched forward, pushing off against the side of the red truck. He was coming after her. Startled, Carla dropped her keys. She looked down, but the ground between the parked cars was a shadowy no-man’s-land. The keys must have bounced and landed—where? She didn’t know.
Her last weapon was gone.
Panic overwhelmed her. Cowboy Boots was mumbling as he barreled forward, and while she couldn’t understand his words, she didn’t have to: the tone was enough of a tip-off to his mood and his intentions. He might have been fat and old, but he was big, and she was small.
She would make a run for it. Yes. That was what she would do. Dark snowy fields surrounded the lot. No trees to provide cover, but the snow was deep enough to give her an advantage in a foot race: She was much lighter than he was. But if he caught up to her, the advantage would be reversed. His bulk would work in his favor.
“Hey.”
Another voice. Where had it come from? Carla’s head whipped around.
It was New Guy. A cigarette was slung in his mouth, which explained why he was out here. He came at Cowboy Boots from the other end of the row.
“Help you with something?” New Guy said.
Cowboy Boots sized him up. New Guy was slender, but he was wiry, and wiriness can possess the strength of steel. Cowboy Boots seemed to understand this.
“Don’t need no help from the likes of you.”
“In that case,” New Guy said, “why don’t you get the hell out of here? Like, right now?”
Cowboys Boots offered up a sneer. “Shit, mister, she’s all yours. I’d check her for crabs, though. Looks pretty skanky to me.” He laughed a manufactured laugh and left. His mutterings blended with the scrape and chop of his heels against the stiff mini-drifts of snow.
Carla looked at New Guy. She didn’t know what to say. “Thanks” seemed lame. And it occurred to her, as she searched for a proper way to acknowledge his help, that at no point in his two exchanges with Cowboy Boots had New Guy’s voice risen above a conversational tone, or acquired even the beginning of an angry edge. There was a gentleness about him, almost a courtliness, that Carla could not quite fathom; it wasn’t weakness—his presence alone had intimidated Cowboy Boots—but it also wasn’t the sort of dumb machismo that generally won the day in these parts. She decided that she would not be surprised to find out that he was from somewhere else.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.”
He was older than she’d thought. Maybe even older than Cowboy Boots. He wore a thick plaid parka, cargo pants, work boots. He had a hard, angular face that had once been handsome. She liked a memory of lost handsomeness, she decided, even better than the kind that was still there. His hair was hidden under a watch cap.
“You really helped me out,” she said. She had to say it, lame or not: “Thanks.”
“No problem.” When he drew on the cigarette, his cheeks caved in. The red tip of the cigarette glowed. She could not take her eyes off it. He blew out the smoke, lifting his chin as he did so.
She waited for him to say something else. A wisecrack, maybe, about Cowboy Boots. A funny insult. A joke. Hell—she’d settle for anything.
She was freezing her ass off. Why was she still standing here?
Because there was something compelling about this man. Something very different from the men she’d known. A kind of quiet integrity or calm strength or—whatever. She could not put her finger on it.
“Guys like that,” she said, “give dive bars a bad n
ame.”
He smiled. Okay, so he had a sense of humor.
But then he ruined everything. He peered at her and said, “You’re kind of young to be hanging out in bars, aren’t you? Dive or otherwise?”
“Yeah, right,” she said. She was disappointed. Crap. Was everybody a narc these days? She’d make him pay. “Thanks, Grandpa. Thanks a lot. Appreciate you looking out for me. Oh—isn’t it past your bedtime?”
“Forget it.” He flipped the cigarette into the snow. “See you around.”
“Wait.” She did not want him to go. She really, really did not want him to go.
What was she doing? What was she playing at? She had a boyfriend, right? Greg Balcerzak. Well, a sort-of boyfriend. Things weren’t all that great. The night before he left for Paraguay, they’d made love, or tried to. It was awkward, and bad. Well, had it ever been good? She and Greg didn’t work. Was it really that, though? Or was it the fact that every time she tried to talk to him about what had happened to her four years ago in Acker’s Gap he just said, “Thank God you’re out of there now,” or asked her if she’d been in love with Lonnie Prince, which wasn’t the point. Of anything. Not even close.
“What is it?” New Guy said.
“It’s pretty cold out here.”
“Can’t argue the point.”
She had spotted her keys on a snow mound next to her left front tire. She bent down and retrieved them. When she stood back up again, she took a deep breath. She felt like she was on a high dive, her toes curled around the front edge of the board. She was spreading out her arms on either side of her body. Looking way, way down at a blue expanse of pure possibility.
“Want to sit in my car and, like, talk?” she said. “Just for a couple of minutes?”
A beat. “Okay.”
She put out her hand. “Carla Elkins.”
“Travis Womack.”
She started the engine to get the heat going. The first thing he told her was his age. She’d been right; he was old. Forty-eight. Jesus, she told herself. That’s not just old. That’s old.
Older even than her mom. But—okay.
They were several minutes into their conversation when Travis made a confession: He had feared her motives when she asked him to chat in her car. He fully expected her to try to buy or sell drugs. “And I was going to tell you,” he said, “not to be an idiot.”
“Great. Another authority figure. I don’t have enough of those in my life.” She made a scoffing noise in the back of her throat.
“Hey. I’ve seen what that shit can do.”
She had a fleeting urge to tell him about her mother, the Raythune County prosecutor who had made it her one-woman mission to stop the drug trade in these mountains. But, no. She did not want to talk about her mother.
“You’re not the only one,” Carla said, “who guessed wrong. I thought maybe you said yes because you were going to—well, you know.”
“Take up where that fat asshole in the Tony Lamas left off.”
“Yeah.”
He smiled. The smile creased his face but did not reach his eyes. “You’re a nice kid. And I can tell you need somebody to talk to. Somebody who’ll just listen. Do I have that about right?”
She started to cry. Just a bit. She did not sob, the way she’d been doing lately, at the drop of a hat. Two teardrops slid down her face. She wiped them off quickly.
He did not react to her tears, which pleased her; instead he let a little time go by. And then he spoke, temporarily relieving her of the responsibility to keep up her end of the conversation. She was absurdly grateful for that.
“Been there,” he said. “When I was your age, and going through a rough patch, I didn’t know how to handle myself. Didn’t know what to do with the things I was feeling—a lot of anger and hate, mostly. All I wanted was to find somebody to talk to. Somebody I’d never met before.”
“And did you?”
“Nope.” Not a trace of self-pity in his tone. He was dispensing information, not asking for sympathy. “There was a family member who wanted to help, who would have done anything in the world for me, but that’s not the same. Family’s too close. Too much shared history. I wanted what you want—a neutral observer. I think it would have made a hell of a difference.” He paused. “So whatever you want to say—say it. Or not. Don’t say it. Either way’s okay with me.”
And so, with the pressure off, she talked. She talked about how, when anybody asked, she said everything was fine—really, really fine—but it wasn’t fine, not at all, and about how, as a consequence of all those things she had stuffed in the back of her mind, like junk you cram in your closet until one day you try to get out your tennis racket and everything falls out on top of your head, she did something bad.
“How bad?” Travis said.
“Bad.”
She told him about how the memories now came back to her at periodic intervals, and how she could not control them, and how they sort of took over her brain, and she could not focus on anything else except how it had felt to see Lonnie Prince drop to the carpet, his chest opening up. The color of the blood. Lonnie. Her friend. And the three old men, dying right in front of her. That, too. It all came back, over and over again.
Not so much the actual events, but how it felt to recall those events. She remembered the memories. And that’s what she could not get out of her head: the memories of the emotions, which were like the shadows of the events themselves. How weird was that?
He nodded. He did not look at her or say something stupid like, “I feel your pain” or “It will all work out”—and somehow that made it okay for her to keep on talking.
She told him about losing control in that store in the mall a week and a half ago. Why did she do it? She did not know. It seemed like the only thing she could do. Like she had to do something totally insane. Something stupid, something she’d never done before, something that was not like her at all. The opposite of her, as a matter of fact. It was the only thing that would get her anywhere close to equilibrium again. Balance. And after that: peace.
With both hands, she explained, she’d started grabbing junk off the racks—scarves and blouses and earrings and belts—and stuffing some of them in her purse and some of them in her pockets. Other things, she dumped on the floor.
Why? She did not know. She just did not know.
And then, when the cops showed up, she still did not settle down. She yelled a lot. She even took a swing at the officer. She did not connect—she was just flailing around, like a toddler in a bathtub who’s just discovered what a splash is—but still.
I almost hit a cop.
Why? She did not know that, either. She was sorry right away, but by then it was too late. Way too late. The cop cuffed her. Read out her rights. Marched her to the mall parking lot and put a hand on the top of her head and shoved her into the back of a squad car.
“Must’ve been a sight to see, you having a fit in the mall,” Travis said mildly.
She appreciated the fact that he wasn’t appalled. Nor was he titillated. He did not treat her like she was some kind of freak, or some kind of hero, either. He just listened.
“And so,” Carla said, winding up her story, “I came here. To Acker’s Gap. I had to. The trouble back there—God, I don’t even want to think about it. I can’t think about it. Somebody from the court keeps trying to call me, but I don’t answer. My roommates, too. But I can’t deal.” She shuddered. “I’m hoping I can just hang out for a while. Maybe it’ll all blow over.” She knew it wouldn’t, but just saying it made her feel better.
“Could be.” He shifted his feet. He did not think it would work, either—by now she could read his body language—but he still said it. “So what’re you going to do? Get a job?”
“Already got one.” She told him about the survey, about asking old people why they had decided, back when they were young and had a choice, to stay in West Virginia. “I’ll be starting over in Muth County on Monday. I’m supposed to go to Thornapple
Terrace. The Alzheimer’s place.”
He had lit another cigarette by now. He removed it from his mouth before he spoke. “That’s where I work. And I guess I’m wondering—how much usable information do you really expect to get from people who have Alzheimer’s?”
“Not the patients. My interviews are with the staff. Most of the people they hire are old.” She clicked her tongue sheepishly. “No offense.”
“You’re right. The aides, the custodians, the office assistants—there aren’t many of us under sixty-five. At the Terrace, I’m one of the younger ones.”
“What do you do?”
“Maintenance. Keep the place up and running. Electrical, plumbing—if it needs fixed, I’m the go-to guy.” He took a long drag on his cigarette. “Forgot to ask if it’s okay to smoke in here.”
“Not a problem.” She wrapped her arms around her shoulders. “Did you know that woman? The one who got killed? Who worked at the Terrace?”
“Sure did. Marcy Coates. Fine woman. Loved talking about her dog. And she really cared about the people at the Terrace. You could just tell. She’d watch their suffering and she’d just shake her head.” He shook his own. “Marcy had some problems, though. Like a worthless granddaughter who’d show up every few weeks, begging for money. I hated to see that. Drove Marcy crazy. She deserved better. But she had a real blind spot when it came to that girl. She’d do anything to help her.” He nodded, agreeing with his own point. “Damned shame about what happened to that sweet old lady.”
“Yeah.” Carla shuddered.
He let a moment pass. “Getting late. I better go.” He looked out the windshield, not at her. “So you’re okay to drive home?”
“Fine.” She liked his profile. It was reassuring somehow, the set of his chin, the long straight nose. The fact that he was older. He’d been through things, too—and survived. “So I’ll see you Monday,” she added. “At the Terrace. When I come to do my interviews. It might take me a few days to finish, so I’m sure we’ll run into each other.”