The world was crowded with girls as heedless of danger as he was sure his sister had been, and he wanted to rescue them all.
The day after his interview, he was in Grossmont again and saw Shelley up ahead outside the trolley station, wearing a scoop-necked T-shirt and the same stretchy pants and teetery platform sandals.
He stopped the Tahoe and lowered the passenger-side window, smiling in the way he knew would reassure her.
“Hey there, Shelley, you look like you just lost your best friend.”
She leaned in the window, revealing deep cleavage. Embarrassed, Willis looked over her shoulder.
“I was supposed to meet my friends, but they’re late or I messed up. They might be at the movie already.”
“Can I give you a lift?”
He drove her to the mall entrance to the theater and stayed there, double-parked, watching her walk away. He thought of Linda lying on the bed in the trailer, crabbing for her freedom, and of Madora growing restless, asking questions. A girl like Shelley would be grateful for Willis’s help.
He watched her walk away.
Next time,
he thought. It would be easy.
H
e came home feeling good and found Madora frying up hamburger patties in a nervous state. The house smelled of onions. She began telling him how hard it was to get along with Linda.
“She squatted right there, in the middle of the trailer, and did her business. And I had to clean it up, Willis. Me. That’s not fair.” She was crying. “You have to do it, Willis. You have to let her go. You said the other night… that the decision was up to you. You said that and now I’m asking you please, please let her go.”
He felt like a small, still pool in the middle of a whirling torrent.
“She was angry with you, Madora. What did you do to make her angry?”
“I was a little late giving her lunch.”
“Well, do you blame her for being ticked off? I suppose you were taking a nap and slept through the noon hour. Is that what happened?”
“I guess.”
“She doesn’t have much to look forward to, Madora. Mealtimes are important.”
“You have to let her go. Set her free, please.”
He heard a troubling note of determination in her voice.
“And exactly how am I supposed to set her free?”
“Tie her up, gag her, drive her somewhere, and let her out. Far away, Idaho or Montana.” She looked half crazy with the spatula in one hand like a club and her hair and face a mess. “She doesn’t know who we are; she’s never seen the house or the trailer. I just can’t do this anymore. Don’t make me, Willis.”
Who would have guessed that Madora would develop a mind of her own?
He took her in his arms, let her sob against his shoulder. Her hair smelled of onions, and he thought of the many smells of women and wondered how they could stand to live with themselves.
“You’ve had a hard day. You’re tired out and not thinking straight. I don’t blame you.”
She stopped crying but she clung to him, her body soft and pliant and like a stranger’s bed pillow, faintly disgusting to him. After some moments he extricated himself and urged her to sit down. He pulled his own chair close to hers so they were sitting knee to knee.
“I thought we were together in this. I thought you wanted to help Linda as much as I do.”
“I take care of her and—”
“And she’s mean to you. I know she is. And you are so patient. I really admire that in you, Madora. Your patience.”
A blush of pride brightened her cheeks.
She said, “But we can’t keep her forever.”
If Linda were gone, there would be a place for Shelley. And when Shelley had her baby he would demand more from the lawyer. Infertile couples were ravenous for Anglo-looking babies and would pay any amount of money.
“You’re right. We can’t keep her forever.”
“But when you let her go—”
“When
we
let her go,” he corrected.
“She’ll go right to the police.”
“Suppose she did? Didn’t you just tell me she doesn’t know anything for sure?” He laughed tolerantly. “Anyway, I wouldn’t worry about Linda talking. You’re not a student of human nature, Madora. But if you had a job like mine where you mix with all kinds of people, you’d get a feel for how they think. Linda will never go to the police. She’s a rebel. She hates authority.”
Madora appeared to be thinking about this. She stood up and he watched her absentmindedly begin to eat the onions she had fried, taking them out of the pan with her bare fingers.
Why not get rid of Madora?
he wondered.
“Do I get any dinner?”
She looked at him and then down at her oily fingers. “Sorry, Willis. You know how I get when I’m worried.”
“You eat. That’s why I don’t buy you sweets anymore.”
There was nothing gross about Madora’s figure, but she was plump and Willis preferred girls who looked a little starved. Their outsides and insides matched.
She watched him eat. “What if you’re wrong, and Linda isn’t like other girls and she does tell someone? What will I do if you go to jail, Willis? I couldn’t bear it.”
How had his life come to this? he wondered. How had he become the protector of these girls who fought him at every turn, who each in her own way sabotaged his kindness? He put down his fork and fixed Madora with an unblinking stare. He spoke with the confident leadership voice his drill instructor had used, a voice Willis had practiced alone in his apartment before he ever met Madora.
“I am not going to jail, and neither are you.”
“Me?”
“I won’t let anything bad happen to you.”
“Me?”
“Madora, are you going to let this girl down? All her life everyone has let this girl down. Are you going to do it too?”
“What do you mean?” Her voice had ripples in it like wind across water.
“Is the government going to help her? What about her mom and dad? You think they can help her? They’ve already messed her up, Madora. A girl doesn’t get messed up like Linda because she has a happy home.”
“I’m afraid.”
“You break my heart, Madora. After all we’ve been through together. I believed in you, and now you don’t trust me.”
She looked stricken.
“I saved you,” he said. “Those men, those bikers, would have come looking for you. God knows what they would have done to you.”
I know,” she said. “I know.”
“Well, then?”
“Linda isn’t like me. I wanted to be saved. I was ready.”
“Are you going to hold that against her?”
“But what are we going to do with her?”
“Don’t let me down, Madora. I don’t know what I’d do if you were to disappoint me.”
L
A’s vast freeway system was constantly undergoing repairs and expansion, which invariably required that some lanes be closed. Where there would eventually be six or even eight lanes in each direction, there might be only two or three for months on end. The same trip could take thirty minutes one week and ninety the next.
“There’s no telling how long this’ll take,” Robin told Django as they drove up Interstate 5—as if he had not spent the whole of his life in Los Angeles and its environs.
Traffic slowed, even in the carpool lane. For fifteen minutes the cars inched along the asphalt, making scarcely discernible progress.
Django watched his aunt surreptitiously. His mother had a name for people who drove as she did, with their shoulders forward and tense, but he couldn’t remember what it was. The memory lapse upset him. Though the sadness when he thought of her was almost unbearable, even worse was the fear that he would stop remembering. He wanted to
remember everything she had ever said, the tone of her voice and the way she looked when she said it; but already he felt her going, losing substance, like a dream slipping away in the morning air. Or a symphony, its rich and complex orchestration dropping off, instrument by instrument. One day all that would remain of his mother would be a haunting one-finger melody, and eventually even that would vanish.
Tears burned the back of his eyes. He needed to ask someone how long the crying would last, how much was too much, too babyish. And then he wanted to throw something to get rid of the sadness, the memories, the reality of what was gone forever; but the only thing at hand was his iPhone, and pitching that through the window would only make things worse.
Robin had told him to put yellow tape on anything in the house he wanted to keep. Some they would bring back with them. Most of it was going to be shipped down to Arroyo. When Robin was occupied he would go into the music room and get the money his father kept hidden in a fake copy of a book called
The History of Early Pipes and Drums
. Jacky had told him that a man never knew when he might need a thousand dollars, cash.
Django was almost dying of boredom in Arroyo. He had been instant messaging and e-mailing Lenny and Roid since midnight and still neither of them had responded to his invitation to meet up at the house. It was summertime and they might be on a vacation, but that was no reason to ignore his messages.
He liked Madora but he didn’t know why exactly, except that when he was with her he felt like he was helping in some way. She was mysterious without knowing it, full of secrets. Once he was thirsty and hot and asked if she could give him water with ice cubes. She didn’t want to and it took some persuading. He had sensed her fear when she took him into the kitchen of the little old house. He had never been in such a dump, and it was hard not to let on. Maybe she was a little embarrassed to have him see the way she lived or maybe she didn’t know any better. The grimy details of the place sort of fascinated him: the shadow of dirt around the doorknob, the closed-in dog and dust and people smell of the living room with a stained sectional couch so massive it took up almost all the space, no pictures or photographs on the walls, not even a calendar. No computer. No TV. No phone. Not even a radio. He knew not to ask her why she lived this way; he knew the answer she would say. Willis.
The more he knew Madora, the more he felt that there was loneliness and sadness in her that matched the same feelings in him and that when he could find a way to comfort her, it would make him feel better too. He didn’t know how he would do it, but he was determined to come up with something eventually.
In about an hour he was going to be back in his old house, which was as different from the dump where Madora lived as any house could be. In Django’s house there were a dozen or more television sets and a bunch of computers,
plus a room for showing movies and a phone in every room including all the bathrooms. He had not told Madora this because he knew it would sound like he was bragging and she might feel bad. Maybe it was better that she thought he was the biggest liar in the world.
There were a few items in the house that Django wanted. But at the same time none of it was important to him anymore. Even the thousand dollars was just in case he needed it. He was stuck, caring and not caring: one desire canceled by its opposite, one feeling negated by its antonym. Like antimatter. The parts of him that were filled with life were disappearing, and all that was left was the longing for his mother and father. The void. He used to like that word, but now he knew what it meant.
Django had been talking to Madora about Jett Jones and she asked him to explain antimatter. He tried but she shook her head and said he lost her. She wasn’t book smart or imaginative, but she was a good listener and asked questions, which his old teacher, Mr. Cody, said was a sign of basic intelligence. He hated it when she talked about Willis like he was some kind of wise and all-knowing saint. Only a bad guy would leave a girl like Madora out in the middle of the boonies in a run-down house with just a pit bull for company.
And there was something jacked about that trailer in the back. Madora said it was empty, but when he had wanted to look inside she wouldn’t let him.
“It’s locked,” she said.
“How come you locked an empty trailer?”
“It was like that when we got here.”
“You mean you never looked inside?”
She watered the plants under the carport, acting like Django was all of a sudden invisible.
“Did you?”
“I told you, I don’t know what’s inside it.”
“How do you know it’s empty if you never looked? It might be full of electronic equipment. It might be worth something. Money.”
“You’re crazy. There’s no electronics in that truck.”
But how could she know that for sure unless she had looked inside? Madora had been lying about the trailer; Django was sure of it; and he wondered why bother to lie about something so unimportant unless it
was
important?
The van was going seventy plus when an electric blue Lotus Elise passed it in the second carpool lane.
“Wow, did you see that?” Django cried, sitting forward. “I bet it was going ninety.”
Robin looked at him.
“That car. It was a Lotus Elise. They can go from zero to a hundred in under five seconds.”
“Sounds dangerous to me.”
Django knew she was thinking about the accident on Interstate 395, and now he was too. He reached in the small cooler and took out a soda and a sandwich.
“You want something?”
She shook her head. “I’m fine.”
He didn’t believe that, not one bit.
She wasn’t fine, Madora wasn’t fine, and he wasn’t fine. The whole world was fucked up. He checked his messages. Still nothing from those jerk-offs. And now he was crying again.
“Waterworks!”
That’s what his mother said to him when he was five and fell off his new two-wheeler with training wheels, shaving the skin off his shin. He bawled, and she cried,
“Waterworks!”
and started him laughing and crying at the same time. And then she tickled him like she always did. His father said,
“Your mom’s a tickling fool.”
Why did he have to keep remembering stuff about her? She was even in his dreams. In one he saw the hem of the skirt she bought when they went to India. She liked the little bells stitched at the hem. Later in the dream he saw the heel of her bare foot and her ankle with the thin chain around it as she disappeared through a doorway. He followed her into a room and knew that she was there, but he couldn’t see her except as a twirling shadow at the corner of his eye. He woke up prickly all over and wondered if the dream was telling him something. He halfway didn’t want go into his house today for fear her ghost would be there. Or that it wouldn’t be.