Then Evelyn lurched to her feet, cried,
Give me that,
and Ingrid, stepping back, felt an explosion in her body. It traveled from her hand up her arm and into her chest as her hand recoiled with the force of the shot.
Ray spun sideways as if he’d been pushed. Tile shattered, Evelyn screamed.
“Are you crazy? Are you fucking crazy?”
Someone was screaming but it was far away. Everything was far away, Mister. Nothing could reach me through all the shaking. An earthquake. We get them in California all the time.
“What the fuck are you doing with that gun, Ingrid? How did you know—”
She took my gun away from me like it was never mine to begin with—
“I think you shot me.”
A man’s voice said that. Hoarse and slurring. I’d heard the voice before but I couldn’t remember where. I closed my eyes to see if I could remember. Then there were two voices speaking together and saying different things. They didn’t make a lot of sense. One of the voices was slurred and one of them kept screaming.
What the fuck are you trying to
Where did
that gun come
She stole it from me, that’s fucking where
What do you
mean from you
Take off your shirt so I can see how deep the bullet went
It’s just that I’m too
You’re too fucking drunk
drunk
It wasn’t too pleasant listening to the voices. And it was pretty hot in the bathroom. I decided to take off my trench coat. I opened my eyes to do it.
My client was on his knees with his shirt half-off. He was bleeding from the shoulder.
And she was standing over him with a bloody washcloth in her hands. Something in her face had gone hard. I didn’t try to touch her. She glanced at me and spit in the sink. Blood mixed with saliva from the punch he’d landed. Mister, even her spit was red.
Evelyn spit again and turned to Ingrid.
“You knew, didn’t you,” she said. “You knew what I did.”
Ingrid shook her head. All of her was shaking.
“But how did you know? Are you trying to freak me out? To make me crazy? So that I’ll tell you how it happened?”
Ingrid’s voice came out high and wavery, not Detective Slade at all: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I just, I thought—”
“Then why the fuck did you steal my gun?”
“Because of me,” said Ray. They both looked down at him. He was hugging his knees, his head turned toward them but his eyes not quite finding their faces.
“What do you mean, because of you?” Evelyn said.
“She was afraid I would—” he broke off and addressed Ingrid. “I never would have—you know—”
Suddenly I was sick of them. Mister, I was sick of them both. I didn’t know what else to do so I turned and walked out of the bathroom. Past the bed with a stupid painting of a lake hung over it and through the crummy door and then I was outside.
It was almost dark now. Over at the Lone Pine Saloon they’d turned on the electric beer signs and I stood there for a while watching yellow lights that were supposed to be beer pouring into a glass. The glass kept filling and filling with light and never overflowed. I still had my hat on and after a while I pulled it down over my eyes. I walked down the gravel path past all the motel cabins and down to the chain link fence that surrounded the swimming pool. It was full of scummy green water and some of last year’s dead leaves. I pushed open the gate and dragged a rusted lounge chair over to the shallow end. Then I sat down and lit a cigarette. There was something I needed to think about, something she’d just said, but I didn’t want to think about it right that minute. Mister, for just one minute I didn’t want to think about anything.
In the bathroom, Evelyn washed her face and spit again. The spit was just pale pink this time, not bright red. She looked in the mirror. Her eyes were swollen from crying and her lip was swollen where Ray had hit her. She felt her chin, then stuck her finger in her mouth and probed her teeth. It hadn’t been such a lucky punch after all—nothing was loose or broken. That was good. She glanced down at Ray, who was passed out again, leaning semi-upright against the pink bathroom tiles. His left eye was swelling shut but his shoulder had stopped bleeding. Waves of alcohol were leaking from his pores, just like out of Joe when he was drunk. Just like every drunk in the world, she supposed.
Ingrid knew the truth now, she was sure of it. She had practically acted it out, right in front of them. She might as well have just come out and said it:
You killed him.
“I killed him,” she whispered to the bathroom walls.
What did Joe think of that? Evelyn closed her eyes to listen. But the ghost of Joe Cullen was silent for a change.
Then came the sound of Ray falling over. Slowly, with his head coming to rest on the bath mat. Ray wasn’t every drunk in the world, Evelyn thought, he was still Ray. Someone she’d loved, someone she was grateful to, not so long ago. And so she helped him into bed, slapping him lightly on the face until he opened his eyes, then hoisting him under his arms so he could stand. She walked him to the bed and pulled back the spread, sat him down on it. He looked up at her. “Evelyn? Don’t leave.”
She knew that what he meant was not
Don’t leave me in this motel room.
He meant
Don’t divorce me.
It surprised her: despite her threat of her-or-me after finding the note from Joanne, she hadn’t truly considered leaving him. Where would she go? To do what? Yet now, Ray’s words hung in the stale air and did not dissipate as fast as she’d expected. They hung there and sunk into her skin a little, like the humidity from the rain. When she answered, she chose to misinterpret him.
“I can’t just sit on this bed and watch you sleep it off,” she said. “I’ll get a room for Ingrid and me next door.”
Ray nodded. “I’m too drunk. I’m sorry.”
Evelyn stood up. Ray lay back on the pillow and then he was out.
26.
From the darkness of the poolside Ingrid watched Evelyn pick her way down the path to the motel office, her hair a torchlight each time she passed a cabin’s weak florescent bulb. She was in the office for a few minutes. Then she came back, stopping this time at twenty-one, the door next to Ray’s. She put a key in the lock and disappeared inside. Ingrid stood up and stubbed out her cigarette and didn’t light another one. There was only one left in the package and she wanted to save it. She adjusted her fedora and went down the path, hoping Detective Slade could ask a few last questions.
She opened the door of the new cabin. Evelyn was fiddling with the window air conditioner. Ingrid sat down on the edge of the bed and a minute passed in which neither of them spoke. Then the air conditioner kicked on and Evelyn turned around. Her lip was turning purple.
“Is your mouth okay?” Ingrid asked.
“It’s okay,” Evelyn said. “Now tell me what the hell is going on. How you knew what I did to Joe. Did you take my gun and clip Ray on purpose so I would freak out and tell you everything? So you could put it in your story or something? That’s cheap, Ingrid. I never did anything to you.”
Ingrid shook her head.
I don’t know what you’re talking about,
she wanted to say. But that was what the guilty dame always said when she was cornered. Ingrid was not going to utter that line again, no way.
“But I don’t know what you did to Joe,” she said. “I took the gun because—because I was scared.”
“Of what?”
Ingrid was silent. She could have told Evelyn about Ray kissing her and saying he was in love with her. But though it made her stomach lurch to think of it, that wasn’t why she’d wanted the gun. She had wanted it for the same reason she wanted the trench coat and the fedora and the cigarette in her mouth. There was something she wanted to do that Ingrid would never be capable of doing but that Detective Slade had a shot at.
A long shot, Mister. But a shot all the same.
Evelyn was waiting for her to answer.
“I was scared of—of my life,” she said finally. “I felt like maybe if I had the gun, if I had this one thing that was secret, a secret that made you strong instead of weak, there was a chance I wouldn’t just have to go along with everyone else’s plans for me. Like maybe I’d find a way out. I wasn’t going to shoot it. I wasn’t even going to take it out of my pocket. I was going to put it back in your dresser after we found Ray and you wouldn’t even have known I borrowed it. But I think I cocked it by mistake, when I was looking at it one time. I didn’t mean to really shoot it, I swear.”
Mister, I’d failed. I saw that now. She would never tell me what had really happened to her and she would never touch me either. Her eyes were bloodshot, and the red just made the blue look bluer than any blue I’d ever seen before or since. The same color as my heart.
Evelyn sat down on the bed beside Ingrid and Ingrid saw that her anger was gone; her shoulders sagged and she put her hands on her chin as if her head were suddenly too heavy. Then she picked up Ingrid’s hand.
“Well, it was very nice of you, coming to my aid while Ray was socking me. He’ll have a huge black eye in the morning, besides the bullet nick. You’re lucky, you know that?” She touched the bandage that covered the tattoo on Ingrid’s arm, ran her finger absently around the perimeter. “I didn’t mean to shoot that gun either,” she said after a moment. “With Joe, I mean. But you see how easy it is.”
Ingrid held her breath.
Evelyn shifted away from Ingrid and picked at a loose thread on the bedspread. It had a pattern of some kind of big ugly flower all over it and smelled like disinfectant. After a moment she spoke, looking at the wall.
“I’d been staying in my sister’s trailer, but I’d gone back to ours to get some clothes or something. He was out at the bars, or with some woman somewhere, and so I lay down in our bed to rest for a while—I wasn’t getting much sleep at Alice Marie’s. I must have fallen asleep, and the next thing I knew, it was the middle of the night and Joe was back, totally drunk and all muddy and stinking. It was raining hard and he was covered with mud.” She stopped.
Evie Lynne, what are you doing? Don’t tell her.
But Evelyn went on. “Some while before this, he’d torn the screen door off its hinges, so we just had the main door of the trailer and it was a pain to latch because it was a little banged up. Whenever he came in he never bothered to latch it, and after a while the door would swing open again if I didn’t get up and close it right.”
As Evelyn spoke, the details she’d spent the last two years trying to leave behind her came flying back: the flecks of mud on the rusty orange carpet, the clear plastic runners they’d put down to try to keep it nice. Joe had stepped off the plastic and was getting mud everywhere. He’d been wearing work boots that caught big chunks of mud in their treads. And a green tee shirt that said Army in black letters. She’d sat up in bed confused and squinting in the light he’d switched on, the fear and anger flooding through her again, again.
Oh, the details were like a crowd of people that surged forward once you opened the entrance gates. Let
me
in; No, me; No, me, me, me! They’d been shuffling their feet and waiting patiently, but now that their chance had arrived there was no holding them back. She was going to tell Ingrid everything, she realized. If she tried to shut the gates again, she’d have a riot on her hands. She touched her swollen lip and went on.
“So Joe came in and banged open the trailer door and didn’t shut it, and he stood there all dirty and stinking. And I told him, ‘Latch the door.’ He looked right at me and grinned, and instead of latching the door he started undoing his belt. Grinning at me.
“And Ingrid, I guess I’d just had it. I told him I wasn’t going to fuck him anymore and he could go fuck himself instead. And so of course he took a swing at me. We were both yelling, but if anyone heard us, they didn’t pay much attention because we were always yelling. I don’t think they heard much that night though, because it was pouring out, and on top of that there always are a lot of generators going on a circus lot.
“Anyway, a couple weeks earlier I’d bought this little gun that I thought I could scare him with. I’d just bought it on a whim, really. Just to scare him. It was in my purse on top of the fridgette, and while we were chasing each other around the trailer I grabbed it out. I had this idea that I’d fire it at the ceiling or something, and that would make him back off. Which was stupid. He’d been in the Army and he knew all about firearms, and what did I know?”
Evelyn took a quick glance at Ingrid, who was staring at her so intently that Evelyn looked away again.
“Go on,” Ingrid said.
“Well, I got the gun out, and he didn’t even see it for a second. I had to kind of hold it up and say, ‘I have a gun, Joe.’ And he laughed, like he thought it was a fake or something.