Angela Sloan (13 page)

He rested the glass on a shelf made by his stomach and smiled at the poodle, who was watching him. “I see you, old friend,” he said, and he stretched to touch the dog's head again while Mrs. Gandy from her chair two yards away burned holes in the side of his face. At last he felt the temperature.

“Did I say something wrong? They've all been dead for many decades,” he said.

Mrs. Gandy didn't speak, only glared.

“What is it?” Mr. Gandy said. Then he looked at me, and dismay covered his face. “Excuse me,” he said. “I'm awfully stupid.”

Mrs. Gandy said, “My God, Alex.” She got out of her chair and left the room.

T
heir embarrassment was interesting to me. They view me as something fragile, I decided. Something damaged.

“This portrait must have been made before the parents were
keyhole,
” Betty said. “Most people will not pay to make a portrait of some orphan brother and sister.”

Mr. Gandy was so visibly rattled that his poodle had stood up. “Now, now, Estevan,” Mr. Gandy said. “Sit. Let's change the subject, ladies.”

“You have a big house,” Betty said. “What is your job?”

“I'm retired from the florin service,” he said.

“Don't know what that is,” Betty said.

“I meant to say
foreign
service.”

“Still don't know. You have work with this girl's father?”

“What's on TV?” I said.

“Yes,” Mr. Gandy said. “Her father and I are old colleagues.”

“I am surprise he will let her drive that Scamp. She is too small. I don't see anybody else who is so small drive a car and go around by herself. I am worry about her maybe. She have said she will help me, but I think, How? She is not an adult.”

“If it were not for me and that Scamp,” I said, “you would have got your hand chopped off.”

“I haven't heard that part yet,” Mr. Gandy said.

“I'm just talking about a very angry old woman with a knife as big as your shoe,” I said.

“I think maybe this girl's father has run away,” Betty said.

“Mr. Gandy knows where my father is!”

“Who is Mr. Gandy?” Betty said.

“I mean Mr. Howell!” I said.

“What will you do, Mr. Howell?” Betty said to Mr. Gandy.

“I don't know what I will do,” he said. “I'm lost.”

“Nobody know what they will do!” Betty said. “I never have stroke a dog before.”

Mr. Gandy jumped on the new topic. “My goodness, would you like to stroke Estevan?”

Betty frowned. She got up off the flowered chintz chair she'd been sitting on and bent to rub her hand along the back of Estevan's neck.

“
Curly,
” she said. She smelled her hand, looked at me, and went on stroking.

“He's just an old pet-grade boy,” Mr. Gandy said. “Did you know that gray is not an authorized color for a poodle? And yet here he is, a poodle and gray! Aren't you, old boy? What do you think of Betty? Is she nice?”

“What do you think of Chinese person touch you?” Betty said to the dog.

“I
am so sleepy,” Betty said.

I intended to have a word alone with her, but it had to wait while Mrs. Gandy showed us to bed one at a time. Betty was first, then me. In the bedroom Mrs. Gandy stripped the mattress and put new sheets on, though the old ones appeared clean. She had me sit down with her while she ran a smoothing hand over the chenille bedspread. “Tell me how you and Betty came together,” she said.

I told her the same story I'd given Mr. Gandy, all vagueness and holes.

“I don't believe that, Angela.”

“Betty may well be lying,” I said. “We'll have to let the analysts sort it out.”

“You know that's not what I mean,” she said quietly.

Well, yes. I did know. But this was my story, and I couldn't change it now. This pushing back against an obvious cover was a very frustrating quality of Mrs. Gandy's. Her husband had not believed my story, either, I'm sure, but he'd had the courtesy to accept it.

She asked me whether I had something to sleep in, and I told her no. “There is probably something of Julie's here,” she said. She brought some folded pajamas from a drawer. Then she started up the questions again.

MRS. GANDY:
Where is Ray, Angela?

ME:
I told you he's on his honeymoon.

MRS. GANDY:
You said he was engaged. Has he been drinking awfully much?

ME:
Less, lately, if you want to know.

I'm not sure why I let this bit of truth out. She knew his history, and even though I didn't want to talk about him, I wanted her opinion.

MRS. GANDY:
Is he in a program?

ME:
No, he's not in a program. He just decided to dry out.

MRS. GANDY:
It was so difficult for him before, you remember.

ME:
Well, yes.

MRS. GANDY:
We've all been worried about both of you. How is he doing?

ME:
I don't know. I've been helping him some.

MRS. GANDY:
Helping him how?

ME:
Just bringing him tangerines, and sitting with him. Listening to him talk.

MRS. GANDY:
What does he talk about?

ME:
Oh, chickens. Africa. Someone named Celeste.

MRS. GANDY:
You know who Celeste is, dear.

ME:
No, I don't.

She studied me a long time.

MRS. GANDY:
What was your mother's name?

ME:
Why do you ask me that?

MRS. GANDY:
Well, I'm a mother, and I'd like to think that if I were gone, my daughters would remember my name.

ME:
I do remember my mother's name.

MRS. GANDY:
What was it?

ME:
There's no need to delve into all of this. Let me get those pajamas on.

MRS. GANDY:
Angela. Celeste was Ray's wife.

ME:
Oh.

MRS. GANDY:
I'm starting to see what's happened. Did you even know that Ray had been married?

ME:
No.

MRS. GANDY:
Well. I never met her. They married in Stanleyville, and we never saw Ray then. The only contact was by radio.
Alex was posted at the embassy in Leopoldville, and we were there, too, the girls and I. You remember that.

ME:
Yes.

MRS. GANDY:
Ray was quite alone in Stanleyville. No one at the consulate up there knew who he was. I mean, they all
knew
him, but they knew him as a businessman, not as an Agency officer. He had some elaborate cover operation going—something to do with a cigarette factory, or a beer concern. He'd spent years building it. And he was quite on his own. You can't blame him for wanting a friend. You expect people to have friends. Marrying her was more complicated, because she wasn't American. The Agency doesn't encourage that. But there was a child.

ME:
A daughter?

MRS. GANDY:
Yes. And Ray wanted her to become a U.S. citizen, so he married Celeste, and Alex smoothed it out somehow with Headquarters and got the girl a passport.

ME:
Okay.

MRS. GANDY:
She was younger than you. I never saw her. She would have been four, I think, when the Simba rebellion happened.

ME:
What happened to her?

MRS. GANDY:
Well, we heard that she and Celeste had both been killed. The news was very broken—the consular staff in Stan-leyville had been taken hostage, and the Simbas controlled the airport, so we really didn't know what was happening, outside of what Ray said in his messages to Alex. Then those stopped, too, and we didn't know whether Ray was dead or alive. A long time passed with no word. And then the Belgian paratroopers landed, and there was a horrible massacre, but some got out, and Ray was among them. And when he showed up in Leopoldville, he had you with him, and he said you were Angela. We heard she was killed, we said. And he said no—if we'd heard that, then there had been a miscommunication. Angela wasn't dead, she was here.

ME:
Please don't talk about this with anyone, Mrs. Gandy.

MRS. GANDY:
But who are you, then?

ME:
There is just no need to delve into all of this. Let's not do it.

MRS. GANDY:
I've always known something was wrong. You were older than you should have been, by years. Alex said not to talk about it. You were traumatized and wouldn't let go of Ray, but I figured—

ME:
Enough. I don't want to talk about this anymore.

MRS. GANDY:
We'll talk tomorrow.

ME:
No. We'll never talk about it. There is nothing to be gained from talking about it.

MRS. GANDY:
I'm not sure that's true.

ME:
I appreciate all of your kindness to me. There's something you don't understand. When you live a cover, you can't be picking through it all the time. You just live it.

I could tell that what I said did not satisfy her. She left that topic, but there were other things she wanted to know.

MRS. GANDY:
Do you have any friends?

ME:
Of course I do.

MRS. GANDY:
Tell me about some of them.

ME:
There are so many.

MRS. GANDY:
Who is your best friend?

ME:
It would be Helen Sanchez.

MRS. GANDY:
What sorts of things do you and Helen talk about?

ME:
Typical girl things. Boys and so forth. Please can I go to bed now?

MRS. GANDY:
Yes. Do you know that you are always welcome here?

ME:
Thank you. I'll be fine once we figure out where to put Betty. I want that project out of my hands.

MRS. GANDY:
We'll ride Babe and Red again tomorrow.

ME:
Okay.

MRS. GANDY:
Will you be all right alone in here?

ME:
Why not? I'm fine alone.

She said good night and left, and I was just as fine as I said I would be.

L
ater, when the house was quiet, I crept along the hall. I found Betty sitting cross-legged on a high, twin-sized antique bed, bathed and dressed in checked pajamas, combing her wet hair with her fingers in a claw shape.

“What are you say to that man about me?” Betty asked.

“Never mind that. You broke your word.”

“Huh?”

“The deal was that you'd say nothing about my father!”

“I have not made that deal.”

“In the future I'll know not to trust you.”

She carried on with the finger-combing. “Why have you lie to him about your father?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“You tell him your father has gone away to be marry. I don't think that is true.”

“Can everybody just leave my father out of it?”

“Because if
that
is true, you will also have tell me that same thing! We have been ride in Scamp all those hours, so long. Why not tell me if your father has gone away to be marry? It is
not
true.”

“I don't like you,” I said.

“Mr. Howell can get me a passport?”

“He could help you, if you'd give him a reason.”

“Mm. People will usually want something back for help you.”

“That's business.”

“Chinese think business is for capitalist making money.”

“Oh, please. Now I'm going to throw up.”

“I have not serve Chinese revolution very well, but I will never betray my people's revolution.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Try to understand what I will say to you, girl. You want me to do something I will never, never do.”

I was surprised by a flutter of respect for that little brown space alien. I put it away. “You're nuts,” I said.

She unfolded her legs and stepped out of the borrowed pajamas. My patchwork print dress went on over her head.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Leaving.”

“No, we are staying tonight.”

“I am leaving tonight.”

“We're in the middle of the woods,” I said.

“I can walk out of the woods,” Betty said. “Can walk one thousand mile.”

She knelt to buckle her cloth and rubber shoes.

“You've got no way to live,” I said.

“It is easy to live. Nobody starve in U.S.”

The hallway was dark except for a soft yellow line at the foot of the Gandys' bedroom door. The Chinese moved quickly, as though she had planned her way. I touched something and it clattered against the floor. Estevan barked.

I ran after Betty. Lights came on behind us.

Outside, there was no moon. The air was wet and sharp. In the distance, a chorus of hepped-up voices answered Estevan's barking. Coyotes.

I felt Betty's hand on my arm. We ran over the soft, crunching gravel.

I had chased Betty to drag her back, and now I was getting into the Scamp with her. I don't know why my mind changed. I stomped on the gas pedal. The porch light came on. The engine heaved but wouldn't catch. Estevan lurched out the door, followed by Mrs. Gandy in a belted white caftan.

My throttle-stomping had flooded the carburetor. But the hour's wait in front of Sears and Roebuck, which had seemed such an inconvenience at the time, now served me well, as I had used that time to study the Scamp owner's manual from the glove compartment. I held
the gas pedal to the floor and turned the key again, and this time the engine coughed twice and roared awake. The clean gravel churned and flew.