Trauma (2 page)

Ruth came in from the bathroom. She was holding up a hypodermic syringe.

Bonnie took off her respirator. She opened her sack a little wider and said, “Just drop it in here. I'll tell Dan about it later.”

Ruth took off her respirator, too. “It was in the laundry. You never know, it might be important.”

Bonnie didn't say anything. Occasionally she came across evidence that the police had overlooked, but she didn't make a religion of reporting it. She was a cleaner, not a cop, and in this business there wasn't much future in letting too many people know that she might have figured out more than was good for her. She had been threatened twice by her own clients: once when she had found some burned fragments of letters in the fireplace; the second time when she had taken a phone call in a house in Topanga Canyon, asking, urgently, “Is she dead yet?”

After two-and-a-half hours, the Glass house was clean enough for them to stand outside for a while and drink strong black coffee, which Ruth had brought with her in a flask. The neighbors continued to watch them, and now they had even stopped pretending that they were trimming their hedges, but none of them came near.

“Where're you going to dump all this?” asked Ruth, nodding toward the beds and the carpets piled up on the back of the truck.

“It's not biohazard. I'll take it to Riverside.”

“I thought Riverside was squeamish about maggots.”

“
I'm
squeamish about maggots. But I'll give Mr. Hatzopolous my sweetest smile.”

She tipped the dregs of her coffee into the gutter and went back inside. There was only the master bedroom to finish off now. It was a cheap imitation of a Niagara Falls honeymoon suite, with cream chipboard furniture with imitation-gilt handles and a pink padded headboard on the bed with two yellowish stains on it from heads that had once rested while the bed's occupants sat up and watched TV.

In one corner stood a spindly dressing table with a crowd of half-used cosmetics on it, as well as a china ballerina with her upraised foot missing. Right in the center of the dressing table was one of those Mexican sugar skulls from the Day of the Dead, with a bite taken out of it.

Bonnie took hold of the grubby white throw and dragged it back. She crammed it into a garbage sack and then reached for the pillows. As she picked the first one up, she found something black clinging to the edge of it, and then another, and another. She shook the pillow in disgust, and six or seven more fell out. They were shiny and brittle, with a pointed, twisted shape like seashells—dark brown rather than black, and faintly translucent, so that she could see that there was something inside them. It was only when she picked one up and looked at it more
closely that she realized what it was: a chrysalis. A butterfly, or a moth maybe, or some other insect.

It must have been the hot weather, she guessed. Last week, cleaning up an apartment on Franklin Avenue, she had come across a mass of huge blowfly larvae, much bigger than any she had ever encountered before. Ruth had said it was an omen, although she didn't know what of. Ruth was deeply superstitious for somebody who spent her time scrubbing the blood of suicides out of people's upholstery.

Bonnie took out the recipe book that her mother had given her when she and Duke were first married.
Home Cooking For Brides
, by Hannah Mathias. The cover was torn, and it fell open at Meat Loaf, which was Duke's favorite. However, she turned to the next chapter, which was Poultry, and found the recipe she had been reading over the weekend.

One chicken, cut into eight pieces

Two cloves garlic

1 green bell pepper

¼ teaspoon ground cloves

2 teaspoons chili powder

1½ cups chopped canned tomatoes

⅓
cup raisins

4 tablespoons dry sherry

⅓
cup green olives, chopped

She put on her reading glasses while she was following the recipe, and she bent over the book with a concentrated frown.

“So what do you call this?” Duke wanted to know, scrutinizing a piece of chicken on the end of his fork.

“Mexican chicken,” said Bonnie, without looking up.

Duke dropped his fork back onto his plate. He sat there with his eyes riveted on Bonnie for almost ten seconds before he demanded, “Tell me something, Bonnie. Do I look to you like a Mexican person? I mean, in any respect?”

Bonnie didn't answer, but went on eating with her eyes fixed on her plate. Between them, their son, Ray, instinctively sat back, as if he were edging himself out of the line of fire.

“Excuse me,” Duke persisted. “Have you noticed me wearing a sombrero lately?”

“No, Duke. I haven't noticed you wearing a sombrero lately.”

“I mean, I don't have a droopy mustache, do I, or a poncho, and I don't go around saying ‘
Arriba! Arriba
!' do I?”

“No, Duke, you don't.”

“So I don't look like a Mexican person?”

“No.” Her throat was so constricted that she could hardly swallow. She knew exactly what he was going to say next and she knew what it was going to lead to, but she didn't know how to stop it.

“I see. You don't think that I look like a Mexican person. So why are you giving me this Mexican food?”

Bonnie lifted her head. “You eat Italian. I don't see your gondola tied up outside.”

He stared at her in exaggerated disbelief. “Is this you trying to be funny? My great-grandfather was Italian. Eating Italian, that's in my blood.”

“You eat Szechuan, too. Don't tell me you're part Chinese.”

“Why do you always have to be so cute? Why can't you answer a simple question with a straightforward answer? I mean,
ever
? Gondola—what's the matter with you? All I said was, what was this stuff you just served up and you said Mexican and I said I'm not a Mexican person and I don't even
look
like a Mexican person, which makes me wonder why you served it up just to annoy me or what?”

Ray muttered, “
I
like it.”

Duke opened his arms to heaven. “Oh, that's wonderful.
You
like it. Shows how much of a gourmet you're not. And why do you always side with your
mother? That's a personal insult you're eating. That's a personal insult to me. Why don't you just admit it? You'd rather eat something that made you sick to your stomach than agree with your old man, wouldn't you? Well, I hope it sticks in your throat, the both of you!”

He threw down his napkin, scraped back his chair and pushed his way out of the kitchen. The swing door
twang-thumped
backward and forward and then stopped. Bonnie sat looking at her meal, her fork poised, not moving. The overhead light made her look as if she were in a play. Ray continued to eat for a while; then he gave up, too.

“Did you really like it?” asked Bonnie.

“Hey, it was great.” She noticed that he had picked out all the raisins and left them around the rim of his plate.

They cleaned up, scraping the remaining food into the sink. There was still quite a lot left in the pot, but Bonnie emptied that into the sink, too. She washed the plates in silence for a while. Ray stood beside her with a dish towel, waiting to dry them, tall, blinking, with coat-hanger shoulders and hair that always looked as if he had just woken up.

He was seventeen years old, the same age that she had been when she had given birth to him. She found it almost impossible to believe. Had she really been that young?

Tonight Ray was wearing his favorite T-shirt with LA CORONERS DEPT printed on it. Duke hated it, or said that he hated it. “I hate that. You want people to think you've got unhealthy interests, or what?”

Bonnie stacked the plates into the hutch. “Your
father's so touchy these days. I'm beginning to think that it's me.”

“Why should it be you? What have you done?”

“Tell me what I haven't done. I've started the cleanup business, right? And I'm still holding down my regular job at Glamorex. You can't blame your father for feeling a little inadequate, can you?”

“He could find a job if he wanted to. He doesn't even try. Just sits on his duff all day watching
Days of Our Lives
.”

“Come on, Ray. He hasn't worked in over a year now. It's not so much that he's lazy.… He's just kind of out of the loop.”

“That still doesn't give him the right to take it out on you.”

“I'm a big girl now, Ray. I can take stuff like that.”

Unexpectedly, Ray came up to her and put his arms around her and pressed his cheek against her shoulder.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing. I just wish that you and Dad could make up.”

She found herself stroking his spiky hair. “We will. I promise you. We're going through a difficult time, that's all. Everybody goes through difficult times.”

“But it's every day. It's every single day.”

Bonnie snapped off her bright yellow rubber gloves. “Never mind. How about a cup of coffee?”

Ray lifted his head and looked up at her. “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”

She laid both hands on his shoulders, smiling. “You can ask me anything you like. I'm your mother.”

“Dad—you know—do you still, like,
love
him?”

Bonnie looked into Ray's eyes and they were the same color as hers: palest faded blue—the blue of cornflowers found pressed between the pages of a family Bible.

“That's a very complex thing to ask me,” she said. “And all I can say is … there are lots of different answers, and even
I
don't know what they are.”

“I knew you'd chicken out.”

“Oh, yes? At least I didn't Mexican chicken out.”

He came bursting into the bedroom at 2:34 in the morning, stinking of beer and cigarette smoke. She lay in bed pretending to sleep while he tilted and ricocheted from one side of the room to the other. His shoes tumbled across the floor and then—shackled by the legs of his pants—he fell full length onto the bed, right beside her.

“Bonnie …” he breathed. His breath was so rancid that she had to turn her face away. “Bonnie, listen to me. I love you. You don't even know how much I love you. You don't have any—
shit
!” he said, as he tried to kick his pants off his ankles.

“
Know
we always argue—
know
that, baby. But it's not always me. Sometimes—sometimes it's you. I mean you work all day and you work all night and you hardly even look at me and think, That's my man. That's my
man
. And a man …
needs
that kind of reassurance, baby. Needs that kind of respect. And what happens to me? I'll tell you what happens to me. I lose my job to some wetback. And then my wife—my dear devoted wife of seventeen years, my
baby, my queen—what does she do? She rubs … she rubs salt in the wound, man. That's what she does.
Salt
. Not only does she cut off my nuts, she serves them up for dinner and calls them
cojones.
”

He clenched his fist and began to pound the pillow. Spit was flying from his mouth, and Bonnie pulled up the sheet to protect her face. She wasn't frightened. She just wanted him to stop shouting and let her get some sleep.

“Mexican chicken, for Christ's sake! Mexican chicken! I mean, like, twist the knife or what? Don't you think I feel—
nothing
enough already?”

Bonnie turned over and put her arm around him. “Duke, you're drunk. Try to get some sleep.”

“You think I'm drunk? I'm not even half drunk. I'm—I'm—
injured
.”

Bonnie stroked the back of his neck. “Injured,” he told the pillow, with even greater vehemence. “I'm injured.”

In the dark, Bonnie could still picture what he looked like when they first dated. Thin, almost effeminate, with a high black pompadour and such a cool way of walking and talking. He was funny, he was sharp, he was always' the center of attention. He could blow twenty smoke rings, one after another. His friends always called him The Dook and mock-bowed whenever they met him. But even The Dook grew older and left school and had to find work; and that was when The Dook discovered that being able to blow smoke rings was no substitute for having vocational qualifications. The best job that he could find was rewiring automobiles—and then, when he
asked for a fifty-cent raise, the company sacked him and brought in a Mexican electrician instead, for two dollars an hour less.

He raised his head. In the dim light from the bedside alarm clock, his face was glistening with tears. “You're not going to leave me, are you, Bonnie? You still love me, don't you?”

“Will you hush up and get some sleep? I have to be up by six.”

“You don't have anybody else, do you, Bonnie? I've seen the way that Ralph Kosherick looks at you. Like his eyes are bulging out and his goddamned tongue's dragging on the rug. You wouldn't screw Ralph Kosherick, would you, Bonnie? Tell me you wouldn't screw Ralph Kosherick!”

“For Christ's sake, Duke, will you stop?”

She closed her eyes and tried to think about something else. Every time Duke got drunk, he raged about Ralph, and the truth was that Ralph was smart and presentable and even attractive in a rather too brotherly kind of way, but there must have been something that Duke saw in Ralph that represented everything he hated to the point of incandescence. Education, and middle-class values, and pants that only just skimmed the tops of his shoes.

“I'm telling you, Bonnie. I could take Ralph Kosherick by the neck and I could physically strangle him, I promise you.”

“Duke, you're drunk.”

He sat up like a Polaris missile going off. “
Drunk
?” he roared. “
Drunk
?” He grabbed the pillows and threw them across the room. “I'm your husband and I'm trying to tell you how much I hurt inside, and I'm
drunk
? Well,
excuse
me! Maybe I should just forget about trying to talk to you and do what Ralph Kosherick does to you!”