Gilia was the worst driver I’ve ever ridden with as a passenger, not that I’ve been a passenger too often. Her idea of merging lanes was to roll down the window, stick her hand out, and wave fingers at whoever she was cutting off, as if people don’t mind you barging in so long as you’re friendly about it.
“D.C. drivers are mythologically terrible,” she said. “Politicians and bureaucrats refuse to recognize the authority of the red light. I think that says something about our government.”
“The middle lane is for turning left.” She’d just pulled an illegal maneuver that caused a moving van to lock its brakes and honk and my testicles to leap skyward.
“I don’t make decisions that far in advance.”
We were driving to High Point in her Ford EXP in hopes of finding and stealing my Datsun 240Z.
“Why did you let Wanda take your car in the first place?” Gilia asked.
“She wanted it.”
“You always give women what they want?”
The answer seemed too obvious to say out loud. Besides, I thought one of us should concentrate on the upcoming intersection.
“Women must take constant advantage of you,” Gilia said. “I like that.”
We parked across the street from the address Wanda had given me several times as the place to send money.
“Kind of run-down, isn’t it,” Gilia said.
“I should save her from this dump.”
“She must have wanted to leave you real bad to move here.”
No 240Z or any other car was in front and the house looked dark and empty. Beyond empty, it looked uninhabited. There were no curtains or shades, no clutter on the porch that sagged vaguely southeast. Several windows were cracked or broken.
“Maybe she doesn’t live here but uses the address as a mail drop,” I said. “She was accustomed to a privileged way of life.”
“Only one way to find out.”
“You stay here while I check things out.”
“Don’t be silly, I’m with you.”
“If she comes home while I’m inside, things could get ugly.”
“I like other people’s ugly scenes. All that intense emotion, words spoken without thought, domestic violence—it’s neat if I’m not taking part.”
“But what if she expects you to take part?”
“I’ll slap her upside the head.”
I looked at Gilia in the late afternoon light. Her eyes sparkled, but I couldn’t tell if it was from resolve or amusement. She was either being supportive in my time of tension or making sport of my personal problems. Either way, it would be nice not to face Wanda alone.
As we walked toward the house, I said, “Sometimes I wish I believed in firearm ownership.”
She buddy-punched my shoulder. “Yeah, right, Wyatt Earp. In a showdown you’re more likely to pull out a credit card than a gun.”
***
The front door was locked and I was ready to give it up and head back to Greensboro, but Gilia reached through a broken window pane and flipped the bolt.
“You’ve got spine to spare dealing with my father and Skip, why turn into a whuss when it’s your wife?”
“Wanda’s meaner than your father and Skip.”
The living room wasn’t as bad as I’d expected—bare floor, single mattress up against the wall, overflowing ashtrays, pizza boxes with the one-two Domino’s logo. I’d expected rotting trash and human feces; this was no worse than the average freshman dorm. On one wall someone had painted a Harley-Davidson that was fairly good.
Gilia wrinkled her nose at the smell. “So what’s Grandma’s jewelry stored in?”
“A box covered with green felt; at least that’s what the stuff was in when Wanda took it. Desperate as she’s been for cash, I doubt we’ll find much.”
Gilia bent down and turned over a couch pillow next to the mattress. “This it?” She held up Me Maw’s jewelry box.
I nodded. “I don’t suppose—”
“Nope.”
I wandered down the hall and into the kitchen, where my baseball cards lay stacked on a linoleum-topped table. They were a mess. She’d mixed American League with National League and relief pitchers with starters. A sticky bottle of Log Cabin syrup was balanced on 1968. I guess she hadn’t had time to figure out how much the collection was worth or where to sell it. She’d only stolen it to hurt me anyway; I told her a long time ago it wasn’t worth huge amounts on account of Caspar burned all the pre-August 1963 cards, including a 1954 Alvin Dark that was the pride of my youth.
Don Drysdale, ’65, fell on the floor, and when I bent to get him I discovered one table leg was propped up by
The Shortstop Kid
. I dropped to my knees and pulled it out from under the leg, which caused the table to tip and more cards to fall.
The Shortstop Kid
had been my first published novel. The day my carton of books arrived, I’d been so proud I took a picture of the mailman.
The cover was a boy in a home uniform, tagging second and making the throw to first. The kid on the cover was right-handed and my kid was left-handed, but even that didn’t spoil the moment. I opened to the title page and read the inscription:
For Wanda, My love for you shall never fade nor falter. You are my purpose. Yours, Sam.
“Sam, come here,” Gilia called.
“Just a sec. I found the cards.”
“Now would be better.”
I followed Gilia’s voice down the hall and into a bedroom, where I found Wanda passed out in a bed with two men—kids really. She was in the middle, on her back with her mouth open, naked. Wanda’s breasts were so small she looked like a little girl. Her pubic hair had grown out some since I’d last seen it, and she had a bruise, or a hickie, I don’t know which, on her thigh.
“Are they alive?” I asked.
Gilia stood against the wall. “I think so. They all seem to be breathing.”
The guys had long hair. One wore an ankle bracelet made of leather and the other had a dark blue tattoo on his shoulder that said
Hog
. Both of them were touching Wanda.
“They’re making a movie,” Gilia said. She nodded toward a Panasonic videocamera on a tripod. It was aimed at the bed. A red light on the side blinked slowly.
I looked from Wanda to the book in my hand, and back to Wanda. Memory was hard to connect to reality.
Gilia stepped toward me and touched my arm. She said, “I can’t picture you married to her.”
“Would you gather up the cards? They’re on the kitchen table.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’d like to stay here and watch her for a while.”
***
Gilia glanced in the rearview mirror, then over at me. “Did you steal the videotape?”
“How did you know I wanted to?”
Her face crinkled into a smile. “I’m starting to see how that misguided mind of yours works.”
Everybody thinks they know how I think but me.
“You look at watching your wife’s porno flick as a duty,” Gilia said, “as if you owe it to the experience of losing her.”
Those weren’t the exact words I’d used, but close enough.
Punishment deserved
was what I’d thought. The moral person does not avoid punishment deserved. But then at the last moment, in a giant spiritual step either forward or backward, I chose to skip the heartache.
“Besides,” Gilia went on, “that tape in the hands of a lawyer would put an end to Wanda’s hopes of taking your money.”
“I guess I couldn’t do that.”
“Or we could mail the tape to her parents. It might actually help Wanda in the long run.”
“I’m not good at hurting people in the short run to help them in the long run.”
Gilia made a right-hand turn that left rubber on the curb next to my driveway. Her mind seemed to drift, which left her braking foot unattended until almost too late to save my garage. Only by stiff-arming the glove compartment did I avoid seat belt burns.
“You always drive like this?” I asked.
She looked at her hands on the steering wheel. “I was thinking about seeing Jeremy in bed with another woman. They were ignoring me so I got up and sat in a chair at my vanity table and watched him on top of her. She lifted her feet high and sweat ran down her neck. Jeremy’s eyes were open in that foggy look I’d always thought was love. It was like a dream where you want to scream, but can’t.”
“Wanda must have been a low-quality person when I married her. I wonder why I didn’t notice?”
“You see what you want to see and hear what you want to hear.”
“Is that a quote? Sounds like Shakespeare or Woody Allen.”
“It’s me.”
“Oh.” We sat looking at the garage, the yard, and my big old house. I didn’t want to go inside. I wanted to sit next to Gilia and feel clean.
“Did you love Jeremy?” I asked.
“A lot. Did you love Wanda?”
I saw Wanda on our wedding day. She’d worn a beige dress and smiled at me. “I thought I could save her.”
“That’s not the same as love.”
I leaned across and kissed Gilia. Her lips didn’t respond. She didn’t flinch or fight, but it was definitely a one-sided kiss.
After about four seconds, she pulled back and said, “I’m sorry.”
“Is it because you might be my sister?”
The eye contact was intense. “The rebound is too hard right now. I trusted a man and he slept with others, and no matter how nice it feels with you, I know it felt just as nice once with Jeremy. I can’t ever go through that again.”
“My wife sleeps with others and I don’t see it as a reflection on the female gender.”
Gilia’s eyelids were so vulnerable they were translucent. “I’m not ready to trust yet.”
Pursuing Gilia went against the choose-women-who-can’t-hurt-you rule. A tramp’s exit had knocked me into emotional chaos; the mind shuddered to think what would happen if I got attached to, then lost, Gilia. A good relationship might be more risk than I was willing to take.
“When do you think you may be ready?”
She shrugged. “I have no idea. Maybe never.”
“I’ll hang around a while and see what happens.”
“I’d like that.”
Gilia covered my hand with hers. It was more intimate than any sex I’ve had. She said, “Breakfast tomorrow?”
I said, “Cheese blintzes at nine.”
***
Gilia drove away, and as I carried the grocery sack full of baseball cards, Me Maw’s jewelry box, and
The Shortstop Kid
across the yard, I was forced to face the question of ethics. If you’re planning, or hoping, to have an exclusive involvement with someone in the future, should comfort sex be cut out now? I wanted to pursue the friendship and more with Gilia, but because she had been hurt by an untrue man she was particularly sensitive to adultery, even more so than your average woman. I had as much as told Gilia that unlike her sleazeball husband, she could trust me; therefore it did not seem proper to do what I had been doing with her Aunt Katrina.
On the other hand, it’s not like Gilia and I were going steady. We weren’t even dating yet. There’d been a few conversations over breakfast and one unrequited kiss. At what point does a commitment begin? Normally you’d think the line was clear-cut, but I’ve run into problems during that fringe period at the outset when one person thinks you have an unspoken understanding and the other person is oblivious. Those unspoken understandings can wreak havoc.
Something heavy hit the garage wall from the inside—
Thonk
. My heart fired off a monumental beat and my legs went limp. Setting the bag on the grass, I moved closer to listen. A low buzz came from the wall itself, or maybe from something pressed against the wall. Thoughts ran to Mike Newberry or Ryan and Sonny, the vengeance boys. Shannon and Eugene could be in there committing a strange new sex ritual. So many ways of being perverse had come along in the last few years that I’d lost track.
A new sound, like a soft hum, filled in under the buzz. As I reached for the door, there was another
Thonk
. Sudden sounds where sounds aren’t supposed to be means a surprise is coming, and nineteen out of twenty surprises are bad news. I did the Indian stealth walk around to a scrap pile on the back side of the garage and picked out a solid two-by-four. Wouldn’t stop bullets or Ryan Saunders, but it was enough to slow down pretty much anyone else. At the door, I slowly turned the knob in my left hand and raised the two-by-four in my right hand to ear level, then I pushed with my shoulder.
Nothing happened. It was stuck. I leaned back, slammed into the door with my shoulder, it flew open, and I blew into the garage like a Laurel and Hardy routine—splat onto the floor.
The light blinded me, which was weird because I hadn’t seen any light from outside. A rubber wheel passed within inches of my face. As my eyes adjusted, I realized golf carts were moving about the room. Two carts—Bull Run and Antietam—made tight circles, while Vicksburg, the Wilderness, Shiloh, and Appomattox Courthouse had all hit a wall—causing
Thonks
—where they buzzed as their tires spun on concrete.
When the Bull Run passed by a second time, I jumped in. A brick had been placed on the accelerator. I turned off the key and coasted to a stop beside the worktable next to the tool rack.
That’s where I found Clark. He was lying on his back on the table, eyes closed and hands cupped on his sternum, like a laid-out corpse.
“Clark.”
“Let me die.”
“Not in my garage.”
He didn’t open his eyes or move his hands. He simply repeated, “Let me die, let me die.”
I climbed out of the Bull Run and walked around the garage, turning off golf carts. He’d sealed both doors with masking tape, which is why the one I came through had been stuck and no light had been visible from outside. After collecting all the bricks, I walked over and sat back down in the Bull Run.
“Clark, you screwed up.”
His eyes flew open. “That’s no way to speak to a suicide. You might push me over the edge.” For some reason, he’d taken off his shoes and socks, which only made the black outfit look sillier than ever.
“You’re already over the edge. Look at this golf cart.”
Clark sat up and studied the Bull Run. “So.”
“Do you see an exhaust pipe?”
His forehead rippled in thought.
“An exhaust pipe, Clark. Even an idiot knows you can’t kill yourself by sucking exhaust off an electric golf cart.”