New River Blues (14 page)

But take it. Oh, yes.
Locking her car in the carport, Sarah looked in through the narrow window by the door, marveling at the way her recently assembled family was adapting to her small spaces. Denny had set her placemat aside to do homework under the lamp at the round table where they would all presently eat dinner. Oblivious inside her self-made bubble of concentration, she was nibbling on her lower lip and her hair, as usual, was coming out of its braids.

Dietz had somehow created a small clearing at the end of the kitchen counter, where he chopped lettuce and tossed it into a salad bowl. He was sipping from a long-neck beer that he protected from spills by stashing it behind the knife-holder each time he set it down. The scar from his latest near-death experience shone pink under the overhead light.

Directly behind him at the stove, Aggie was being careful with her elbows, squinting through steam-clouded glasses at whatever she was stirring.

My funny valentines.
Sarah walked into her house, and all three faces turned toward her, looking as if they thought she brought home answers. Happy against all odds, she smiled, and they all began to talk at once.

‘I don't get this at all,' Denny said, pointing to her homework.

‘Aggie says she can't stay for supper,' Dietz said. ‘Tell the truth, am I eating her food? Because I don't have to stay—'

‘I told you, I have to hurry home and get all gussied up.' Aggie was putting her coat on as Sarah took hers off. She pulled keys out of her purse, set them down and put her purse on top of them. ‘Can you believe it? I finally talked ol' Sam into ballroom dancing. Now where'd my keys go?'

‘Have fun,' Sarah said, fishing the keys out and handing them to her. ‘Try not to wreck the car on the way home.'

‘I'll be very careful.' She gave a great triumphant hoot of laughter. ‘I wouldn't miss tonight for anything! Sam's going to learn the samba!'

Sarah watched her mother out of the house, enjoying the reflected glow of her pleasure. When she turned back to the table she said, ‘Denny? What were you saying to me before? When I came in,' she added, when Denny looked up at her blankly.

‘Oh. I said I don't understand one of the questions in my social-studies workbook.'

‘Ah. Let's tackle that after we eat. Will you set your books aside now and get ready for dinner?'

‘OK.' Solemn and systematic, she stacked her homework in the space they had reserved for it on the buffet. In Sarah's house, spaces had to be reserved, or you might stand around holding something for a long time.

They ate quickly, with the ravenous appetites of hard-working people. Denny had been skinny and pale from an uncertain food supply when Sarah took her in, and it was a pleasure, now, to see her cheeks rounding out. She cleared the table while Sarah and Will had a coffee, then the two adults did dishes and Denny went back to her homework.

They'd established routines in the past month that jogged along without much discussion. And Denny was always quiet, so if Aggie hadn't warned her, Sarah might not have noticed how uneasy she was. But watching her covertly, she saw the child distractedly pulling hairs out of her head and scratching away at the skin on one thumb.

When Dietz put on his weapon and badge, ready to go to work, Sarah followed him out to his car. He turned at the curb, ready to give her a hug, but she held up both hands in a ‘wait' signal and asked him, ‘Any idea what's bothering Denny?'

‘Little trouble with the lessons is all I know.'

‘Something bigger. Ma saw it too. Well. Stay safe.' She hugged him briefly, gave him a just-barely kiss that was all he could afford to indulge in before ten hours on the griddle of Tucson after dark. She lifted a hand as he turned at the corner and he sent back a friendly little toot.

Homework problems were mercifully easy to solve that night. While Denny got her backpack ready for morning Sarah started a couple of the perennial loads of laundry that she now thought of as growing like mushrooms in the house whenever the lights were turned off. By the time the washer and dryer were both whirring, Denny had her teeth brushed and was getting into bed. Sarah appreciated the fact that she never had to nag Denny over things like bedtimes, as she had heard so many mothers do. She sometimes reflected, though, that Denny's good behavior was a little unnatural. Maybe she still didn't feel sure enough of her welcome to misbehave.

Thinking about that, she went in and sat down beside the small solemn girl on the narrow iron bed – Aggie's childhood bed that had served Sarah and Janine and now was Denny's. It was one of the few things they'd brought across town when they closed up the house on Lurline Street.

‘We've got time for one chapter of
Tom Sawyer
, if you'd like.'

‘OK.'

‘Or is there something you'd like to talk about?' She picked up the hand with the tortured thumb. ‘Did you have trouble at school today? You seem a little uneasy.'

‘I'm OK,' Denny said quickly. Her voice broke when she said it, though, and then tears were running down her cheeks. Mortified, she pulled a sheet over her head. The sobs that came out from under it almost made Sarah's heart stop. Immediately, she began imploring Denny to stop. She knew it wasn't fair to ask a child to stop crying – but that was a rule for other people's children. This was Denny, whose suffering she found unendurable.

‘Oh, honey, what? Tell me.' She gathered the pile of sheet-wrapped child in her arms and pleaded. ‘Denny, please try to stop now and tell me what's wrong, so I can fix it.' The folly of promising to fix a problem without knowing what it was didn't even occur to her. Denny, who never cried, was crying. She had to fix it.

Denny heard her and believed – believed
something
, anyway, that was good enough to get her out from under the sheet.

A little bald spot was growing where she'd been pulling her hair out. Water in various stages of dilution was coming out of her eyes, nose and mouth. Too juicy to talk, she sucked air, uh uh uh. Sarah passed her a tissue and said, ‘Blow,' and when that was done, ‘Now tell me what's wrong,'

Denny hiccuped a couple of times and finally blurted, ‘Why didn't you tell me Mom was coming back?'

‘The police called me this afternoon,' Felicity said, speaking just above a whisper though she was alone in her casita with the windows closed.

‘So?' That was standard Zack shtick. Always so superior and indifferent. You were supposed to just give up and slink away, ashamed of having, as he said, mistaken him for somebody who cared.
Not this time, mister.

‘Where have you been, anyway? I've been calling you for hours.'

‘None of your business. The police called, so what?'

‘The freaking Tucson police. How'd they get my name? You promised you'd keep me out of this.'

‘You are out of it,' Zack said, ‘unless you got yourself in. What did you say to them?'

‘Nothing. I pushed over a couple of boxes of props and pretended we were having an accident at the theater so I could hang up the phone.'

‘Oh, that's smart. Now they'll be sure to call you back.'

‘And when they do I need to be gone! You hear me? You have to get me my money right away now so I can go to LA and change my name.'

‘Change your name? Since when is that the plan? What about all those credits you keep bragging about?'

‘The people who matter will write me a new blurb.' She hadn't thought of that before, but now that she said it she was sure it was true – the two directors who believed in her would understand a name change and write a new letter. New face, new name, why not? As for the catalogues, she had the pictures . . . Zack had just asked her something . . . ‘What?'

‘I said what about your job at the theater? You can't just walk out on Derek—'

‘Who says? He's such a pig, he'll never give me a decent recommendation anyway. And nobody with any status cares what he thinks. All I need is the money and I'm gone.'

‘Well, it's going to be a few more days yet.'

‘Oh, Zack, honey, come on!' She uncorked her nuanced whine, practiced for years on her mother and perfected on a succession of boyfriends. ‘I can't leave town without that money and I need to go right now! Haven't I' – she tried her Maggie voice from
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
– ‘been good to you? Well, then! Baby, you know I can't talk to the police, I'll get too scared!' She dragged it out over two syllables: scay-yered. A little fire, now: ‘You better not let that happen!'

There was a silence, or almost a silence, a pause broken only by the rasp of a Zippo lighter wheel turning against flint. She heard him suck air as he lit one of his filthy Marlboros. He clicked the lid shut, blew smoke across the speaker of the phone, and said, ‘Or what?'

She had been working hard to erase Zack from her memory since two nights ago on the stairway in the Henderson house. And she was making progress – most of the time he was just a blurry shape with fading colors. When stardom found her, as she knew it soon would, she was sure she would no longer remember him at all. In fact a Zack-free memory was one of the ways she would know when she had grabbed the brass ring, nailed the big part – made it.

But right now his image came up revoltingly clear in her mind's eye. He would be standing by the wall phone in the kitchen at Party Down. The front of the shop would be dark now and locked up, the harsh overhead kitchen light shining on the metal sinks and scrubbed butcher-block tables where she'd unloaded the remnants of so many celebrations. He'd have thrown his apron in the laundry hamper and hung his uniform jacket in the locker. His ropy white arms would show their garish tattoos below the sleeves of the sweaty white T-shirt he'd worn to work.

Of all the sacrifices she had made for her Art, none galled her as much as the fact that she had gone to bed with this man, in the dingy cheerless cave he occupied above the store. That was how she always thought of it, ‘gone to bed,' never as ‘fucked' and certainly not as ‘slept with.' Fucking implied at least some stirrings of lust, an emotion she could not imagine feeling toward Zack, and sleep suggested a level of relaxation she would never be able to achieve in the same room with him, let alone the same bed.

She had endured his piggish rutting in order to secure her position as his Numero Uno, his Girl Friday, while still giving her job at the theater first priority. As long as she didn't charge him for sex and did the work of two people on the parties she worked, he accepted her frequent absences and late schedule changes, and gave her the lion's share of the tips. As much as anything else, it was the puniness of the rewards that put a halo of shame around the sacrifice of her beautiful body to this grubby man. But she did what she had to do for her Art. You had to find ways to keep yourself Out There, being seen and applauded by as many people as possible while you waited for your Big Break.

She had worked for Zack for nearly a year, adding steadily to her list of reasons to despise him. Aware from the beginning that he was a bully but believing her obvious superiority gave her the upper hand in the relationship, she had not begun to fear him until two nights ago when he grabbed her nose. Now she had been up the stairs at the Henderson house and down again, and understood how truly frightening he was. She longed to see the last of him, but at the same time she was desperate to hold his attention. She had to stay close by, tempting and goading him, so he would not try to cheat her out of her money.

Since the first time Madge had mentioned it, tossing off his casual offer and then waving away her thanks with a jolly shrug, she had hardly thought of anything else. And from that first moment she had called the money she was getting, ‘My money.'

Madge had made it clear that he couldn't be involved directly and that the money would come from Zack. But it was Madge who had promised it, and while he was a relentlessly frivolous man he played, she noticed, mostly with rich people. There was a lot about him she hadn't figured out, but every word out of his mouth, his car and clothes and attitude, showed he didn't need to worry about money.

Why he hung around the theater where everybody did need to worry about it was one of the many mysteries about Madge. She had thought about becoming Madge's girl, had trailed her coat a little, but while he slathered her with attention and extravagant compliments when there were people around, he never made any moves on her when they were alone. So was he gay? She couldn't tell. Anyway it wasn't sex he was after with her. For all his light-hearted kidding, Felicity thought she might have finally met a man who appreciated her for her talent. It was a thrilling thought.

Felicity, all of her life, had been taught to think of herself as being in the sweet spot, at the center, on top. The tough things about show business, the fierce competition and people who tried to take advantage, were temporary inconveniences. Her mother had drilled it into her that she was special and must always remember it, that positive thinking would carry the day. Now that Madge had discovered her and she was so close to achieving her goals, Felicity was becoming more firmly positive every day.

So before she hung up she made it clear to Zack once again that he positively had to bring her the rest of the money right away. ‘You don't want me to get trapped into talking to the police, Zack. I might get rattled and say something we would regret.'

Zack sat naked on the edge of his hard bed for some time after Felicity hung up, smoking and drinking bourbon out of the bottle on the floor. At intervals, in a rasping, barely audible voice, he vented a string of profanity. Nino was a treacherous snake, Felicity a cunt, and the army a whore's nest of liars and thieves. His anger at the first two was just a passing irritation compared to his mountainous ongoing rage at the army, which had put him through ten years of mostly hell and then robbed him of the rewards he had earned, sending him home from Iraq with a dishonorable discharge because he had done what everybody around him was doing, but in front of a general with reporters nearby.