Into the Valley (16 page)

31.

In the morning, he made her shower and wash her hair. “We gotta get you dolled up the way I first saw you,” he said. She shrunk under the water as if the drops burned her skin. She made no move to lather or scrub. But Daughtry was waiting. She knew he would make her do it again. She forced herself to soap a washcloth and pass it over her body once, to pour out shampoo and rub it through her hair.

Daughtry appraised her in the mirror as she applied her makeup. He got out the diamond brooch from her bag (she did not ask how he'd known it was there). She did not want to alarm him by telling him about the flyer. “I think that's too formal for day, don't you?” she said. He shrugged. The green poplin dress was laid out on the bed. “But I want to wear the ivory,” she said. “Baby, that's a godawful mess, no offense. You look rundown in that.” He held out the green and when she did not immediately take it, he did not lower his arm. When she finally took it, she knew already it was wrong: the color too bright, the poplin too flimsy, the girlish belling of the skirt. Pulling her back somewhere she did not want to go. He brushed his fingers across her forehead and she forced herself not to flinch.

“We'll get you new dresses, baby. All brand new.”

They went back to the lobby of the Motel 6 and a short wiry man with a blond goatee was waiting, wearing in the heat a buttoned-up dark denim jacket like Daughtry wore his leather blazer. Daughtry had B. stay outside on the hot asphalt where she shifted in the green dress, feeling conspicuous, watching the goateed man and Daughtry enact the mime of exchanging an envelope and shaking hands under the orbed hanging lamps of the lobby. The smell of hot tar from the parking lot sharpened the carsickness.

They took the Mustang. Daughtry sat in the driver's seat without asking.

“Can I see the checks?” she asked.

He laughed. “When we get there, doll. Just hold your horses.”

She distracted herself by counting the rows of crops and fruit trees. But they went too quickly and the telephone poles too slowly and she could not block out Daughtry rambling on about the fishing “down South.” The only thing she could do to escape the growing of ill portent (not holding the checks, the green poplin dress) was to close her eyes and pretend to sleep. But she felt the dread still behind her eyelids. Before she knew it they were parked in front of a cinder-block building hedged by pruned oleanders, the sun glaring off its silver-coated doors. She had a moment's hesitation that she'd already been to this bank. She decided she had not.

“Can I see them now?” B. asked.

“Sure, baby.” Daughtry handed over the vinyl book but watched her with it as if she were a small child handling a delicate ornament. She ran her fingers over the paper, studying the lines, the block address and cool blue pattern, the name to match the fake license.

“You know what to do?” he asked.

This struck her as funny and she laughed the first genuine laugh she could remember in months, until she saw his injured expression. She patted his hand and told him she knew and got out.

The entire length of her rushed with blood. She felt as she walked toward the entrance that her skin needed only to be brushed up against for her to explode. But the bad signal came immediately in her reflection in the glass door. The light green and belling skirt. When she swung open the door the air inside was too cold. The ivory on the walls not soothing but dull, the line of teller windows a row of draining rectangles and the empty desks pointless.

She made her way to the middle island. She jerkily filled out a withdrawal form; she crumpled it and started over. She absentmindedly put her hand to her heart but the diamond brooch was not there. In the corners of the ceiling she noticed the security cameras for the first time.

The teller's perfume had hints of gardenia, bringing the Brylcreemed boy and the graduation luncheon briefly into her head. She made her way past the stiff bow tie and the white linens in her mind, concentrating to speak each word.

“I'd like to make this out to cash.”

“You're from the city,” the teller said (except it sounded like “thity” because of the girl's lisp).

“How did you know?” B. whispered.

“It says so on your check.” Her lisp had disappeared. “And you don't look like you're from here,” the girl said without a shadow of malice. Then the lisp returned: “Now just a minute, Miss Lawthon, I'll thee if we can accommodate this request.”

The girl walked over to a manager at one of the empty desks. B. waited for her palms to dampen or her heart to race but no fear or anxiety was in her. Her body seemed to slacken, as if it were ready to be led away. But when the manager glanced over, his easy nod and smile showed that he had no qualms about her, the pretty patron with her clean dress and washed hair. The cool expansive feeling did come then. She thanked the teller and gathered the cash and walked out.

In the car, she presented the money to Daughtry. “Sweet Jesus. They practically handed you the reserves. Is this how easy it's been for you? We should do another, baby! While we're on a goddamn roll.”

But by then the cool expansive feeling had already faded.

He drove them an hour north and when she did the next bank, an old stone building with ionic columns and octagonal-shaped lamps, it was the same easy success and the same fleeting cool expansive feeling. A siren rose faintly in her head. Like a careening from a distance, the pitch higher and higher but never arriving.

“C'mon, let's do another,” Daughtry said. “Hell, I'm Irish, we know a thing or two about luck.” He drove an hour southwest this time, babbling about Mexico on the way. “
. . .
and in the little fishing villages, you can live right on the cliffs. Right on the Pacific Ocean. Just like those Seventeen-Mile Drive bastards, except ours
. . .
They have a beautiful kind of tuna down there, baby, a gorgeous fish, tastes like steak and they swim around by the boatloads. And all the water warm as a bath, no fog, no cold
. . .
And then, baby, after we finish the season, we'll travel. We'll see the whole goddamned beautiful continent, the ruins and the jungles, and never think of this rat race again.” B. heard him only intermittently through the siren. It blared behind her eyes now, rising to a shriek. It was white in her mind. She clutched the seat. She tried to focus on Daughtry's house at the sea but she could only glance at a pink adobe with birds of paradise and then watch it vanish.

At the last bank, she could not walk steadily. The shrill of the siren bleaching everything to a white blur. Before she got as far as the start of the line, she buckled. She got up before anyone got near her and turned around. In the car, she told Daughtry the same thing she told herself: she was too hungry and too tired and it would go better in the morning.

Daughtry took her to a steakhouse they'd passed on the way
in. It was an old Victorian, with tall shutters and a porch edged in
scallops, stained floral wallpaper behind the leather booths and chairs. Daughtry ordered her a T-bone with a side of spinach and a martini. “You need iron. And you need a drink.”

He smiled a wide dopey smile and grasped her hand. “I like taking care of you,” he said. Then he lowered his voice. “I want to take care of you every night, baby. Every night I want to make you feel good.” Inside the siren B. could only nod at his short yellow teeth.

He watched her eat. The grainy meat stuck in her throat, it made her gag. She finished her martini and asked for another. By the third round Daughtry stopped watching so closely and the alcohol at least blunted the surface of the siren, letting the churn continue deeper down. She waited until Daughtry got up for the men's room and slid the rest of her steak into her
napkin. In the small opening created by the martinis, she tried to grasp at the pink adobe house as a way to breathe. She tried to
think reasonably about a house again, to think about it in a way she had not yet: she could go there with Daughtry. It might not be so bad, she told herself. To learn to make fish soups, to embroider festive blouses and arrange tropical flowers in vases. (She had no other vision of what she would do in the house.) Maybe she had been wrong about marriage. Perhaps this had been the answer all along—never the banks, never the checks. But as she told herself this, the siren drilled violently through the alcohol to the top of her skull. She seized the edge of the table, knocking over her martini. Gin dribbled onto the green dress. Somewhere inside the violent tilting, she knew
it would not matter if it was Daughtry or the Boston almost-fiancé or the university man or the developer and Sherry.
I
t would not matter who was in the pink adobe house with her,
she did not want to live in it with any of them.
She did not want to make fish soups. She did not want to be taken care of or to fix her hair. She wanted only to get away, to start over, to undo something that seemed to bind her. She wanted only to find a calm quiet place to breathe. The landscape of her daydreams, the blue-white featureless expanse.

Daughtry came back from the bathroom and slid beside her, nibbled her neck. His aftershave and sweat and meaty breath only vaguely penetrating the careening. Her fingertips were bloodless from gripping. She pressed herself against his chest and palmed his lapel pocket.

He snatched her hand. “What d'you need those for, huh? Don't you have enough here?” He leaned her back and wiped at the green dress with a napkin. “What d'you need those for right now?”

She sat immobile as he wiped her. “Get me out of here,” she whispered. Daughtry downed the rest of his martini, unfurled the new bills on the table and led her out by the elbow.

He made a point of locking the checks in the trunk of the Mustang, and in the motel room he dragged the mattress from the bed and shoved it against the door. “You're beat. We both need a good night's sleep without getting up drunk and having an accident.” She lay down on the mattress and closed her eyes, as if this might have any effect on the siren. Daughtry held her to him. “The last thing I need—Christ, the very last thing—is kids. I see you worrying, and you don't have to. Not with me.” He kissed her cheek.

He had never asked her how there could be no scar. No mark from the invented hysterectomy. He did not, she knew, really want to know.

“Shhh.” She put her finger to her lips. “Let's just sleep.” From her lock in his arms, she watched the shaft of yellow porch light through the curtains. She kept her eyes on the shaft of light for as long as she could.

32.

The next morning she had not slept. The siren had quieted but the spinning continued, the unnameable dread had grown with each hour. Daughtry had woken early while she'd pretended to be asleep to delay having to speak. He had gone out and brought back coffee and somehow acquired nail polish remover and a tortoiseshell plastic headband.

He insisted on another shower. Before she got in he wiped the ragged pink polish off nail by nail. “Better to have none than to look chipped. We can get you to one of those nail places later.” Then he found a file in her travel bag (she was surprised to remember she owned such a thing) and cleaned out and filed her nails one by one.

She stood silent as he worked the plastic tortoiseshell into her hair. “To add class,” he said. He stood back to admire her. She was aware beyond the spinning and fatigue that the itching and burning in her crotch had returned. The sex with Daughtry had brought it back, like a chronic affliction.

“I need cranberry juice.”

“Sure, baby,” Daughtry said, but he was adjusting the headband in the mirror and not listening.

At breakfast, he made her eat half a doughnut and a few bites of egg, all of which choked in her throat. The restaurant had no cranberry juice.

She tried to steady herself by focusing on the Formica table. But the gold flecks jittered around like a frantic cosmos. “So this time try for a little more,” Daughtry was saying. “You're looking good. You're looking like a living doll, you want to know the truth. They won't peg you. And the sooner we're done, the sooner we split.”

Daughtry went on lauding their prospects. She reached into the ostrich-skin purse and absently touched the knife.

Inside the bank, she noted the two security cameras first and looked into each as if to acknowledge them. Then she made a check out to herself for $10,000.

The attractive brunette with hair teased into a bouffant smiled widely at B. “I'll just have to approve this with my manager,” she said in a cheery voice.

B. nodded robotically. She did feel like a living doll, made up and ready.

A large man in a red tie and a sea-blue suit walked back with the teller. “Have you checked this with anyone, ma'am? I wouldn't want you to overdraw the account.” He stared at her from his plump face, quivering at the jowls.

“It's ‘miss.' No, there's no one to check it with.”

The man's doughy eyes did not move from her.

“It's a large amount,” he said.

“It's what I want.”

He coughed. The brunette teller stood at his side, smiling, pressing at a bobby pin in her hair, apparently unaware what was holding up the transaction.

“Excuse us for a moment,” the manager said. He walked away. The teller remained a beat, still smiling, then followed him.

B. saw him talk to another man in a tie. She saw a security guard watch the two men talking, then watch her.

Something warm entered her then. It puzzled her at first. She felt it spread. Starting inside the spinning and moving through her entire body. A pleasurable, liquid sensation. A warm analgesia, but emanating from the carsickness. As if the nausea and whirling had beaten so violently inside her they'd mealed the element that still fought them into a warm, pliant pulp. Like alcohol in her veins.

It was wonderful.

She waited to see if this blanketing would continue. It did. In this sensation, she began to discern something. She saw it finally: the carsickness was the truth. A warmth and clarity pouring through her, to guide and protect her. Now making the light more clear, the air purer, the path illuminated.

She saw it all clearly now. Her view of the circumstances sharpened. The banks were done. She no longer needed them. The carsickness was the thing to keep, to stay inside of. She pitied the teller who did not have this understanding. Who would go on fixing her hair and painting her nails and smiling confusedly, without the carsickness to bring her the truth.

The truth that the dissonances were, in fact, irreconcilable.

She felt suddenly as if nothing could touch her. Like lying in Daughtry's balmy ocean, warm and sedated and enveloped tenderly. Lifted from every shard and cutting pebble below. She reached into the ostrich-skin purse and grabbed hold of the knife.

When the manager and teller returned, her voice was steady and direct.

“I have a friend outside with a gun. If you don't give me the money, he'll come inside and shoot you. If he sees you signal the guard or pick up the phone, he'll kill you.”

The brunette appeared not to comprehend. She was frozen with a half smile on her face, waiting for the punch line. The manager's wall of jowls shook in fury. The waves of warmth and clearness guided B.: she had read somewhere that a bank must honor the mere threat of a weapon; she calculated that Daughtry was too far away for the manager to see his face through the glass door. She was not certain, however, if there were cameras in the parking lot.

The manager glowered at B. She knew: at her soft hair, her belling dress, her small hands.

“The ten thousand dollars now or he'll shoot,” she said calmly.

The brunette's face crumpled then. There was a long pause in which B. still felt no fear, only the warm liquid clarity pouring through her. She locked eyes with the manager.

“Get the money, Cindy,” he finally said.

In the car, she told Daughtry, “It's for your boat.”

He held the wrapped stack of bills in disbelief. “They let you fucking go with this? Just like that?”

“You can have the boat now,” she repeated.

He looked at the money, not moving.

“We should go, Harold,” she told him gently.

No one followed in the side mirror yet. Daughtry was silent. They passed an orchard covered in blight, half the leaves brown and shrunken. But the sight did not disturb B. It seemed a natural part of the new gift of the carsickness, the relentless truth, the laying bare. When the Mustang was on the highway, she ducked under Daughtry's legs and rounded up the rest of the money. All of her actions clear and natural in her body without her having to understand them. She smoothed the bills into a single bundle.

“It's better if you keep everything for us,” she explained, handing it to him.

He slid the bundle inside his lapel pocket mechanically. His forehead was ashen with sweat. “You're different than I thought you were,” he said. “You're not the other girl at all.”

It was not clearly admiration or disappointment, and B. felt she could only agree.

“I'm a little shaky,” she said. “Let's drive for a while and get a bottle somewhere.”

He nodded. He seemed too stunned for the moment to argue with her.

It began to fragment here. Beautifully. Her body on one side, apart, abstract. For the first time since childhood. Whether it was appealing or not, adorned or not. Her body now a vessel for the warm light of the carsickness. She thought of worrying and fretting about bare shins or chipped nails or mussed hair and she wanted to laugh.

Daughtry pulled off at a gas station with a convenience store attached. He paused after he cut the engine, put his hand on her knee.

“You okay?”

“I'm fine.”

It was true. In the fragmenting, she was warm and calm and clear. She was not, anywhere in her tissue and nerves, waiting for things to work out. She watched her body in the seat, holding on.

Daughtry didn't remove his hand. She observed his worn leather cuff on her dress.

“Really. I feel better now.”

He let out a sigh and moved his hand to stroke her cheek. “I'm glad, baby. I'm glad I know you like this.” She watched him
go into the store. The hot sun on the car felt no different than the heat all through her. The cuff of his leather blazer worn to cracks against the green poplin dress lingered in her mind. The carsickness—a boon, she was understanding now—laying the dissonances bare: Daughtry was a good man, and he
would
not succeed; she and he did not belong anywhere, and they did not
belong together. The worn leather cuff and the green poplin dress. No one wanted to hear about her basement apartment; her mother was frightened for her; the girls would be free and bare-shinned. The blighted trees stood next to the healthy. This laying bare did not frighten her. She was not frightened.

She would only need to drive now. She would only need to keep going.

Then came another piece of clarity: he would never let her go. He would want her to stay with him, to take care of her, to put headbands in her hair and catch her fish for their soups. Her body in the fragmenting took this in.

Daughtry came back and got behind the steering wheel with a brown paper bag. “This will smooth things out. Then we'll get on the road. We can make the border by morning.”

“Let's stop and drink it somewhere first.”

“Naw, let's drink while we roll. Faster we get going, better I'll feel.”

“I want to stop first.”

He looked at her defiantly. She felt it beginning. She put on her bedroom eyes for him.

“Okay, alright. Just for a little while, baby.”

From there, she heard and saw pieces in the fragmenting, from inside the carsickness. “Baby, alright, baby.” Fingers at the nape of her neck. A dirt road, a wind break, leaves skimming the ground. Daughtry laying out the leather blazer once more. “Fishing boats, Mexico
. . .
Together. Together.” The smooth sharp steel in her hand, the gash in his arm. Against the pale and black hairs the blood bubbling out. Mouth open, no words. The other hand grabbing for her, squirming, then a flick at his cheek, shallow, more blood. A moan. Moans. The eyes. The sad eyes she could not help. Dirt kicked up, sun flaring.

Back in the Mustang, keys in the ignition, wet stains on her dress.

And then: free.