Forever in Your Service

by Sandra Antonelli

  Mae glanced at Kitt. He had no intention of staying to listen to a lecture. “Ten minutes,” she said quietly. “We’ll stay ten minutes.”

  IN SPITE OF THE COLD and the early hour, the Fuller Lodge was packed, standing room only on the polished wood floor of the main hall that was once the dining room for the Boys Ranch School. Light gleamed down from traditional wagon wheel-like fixtures above. The massive room glowed with orange tones of old, hand-hewn pine. The head of a large buck sat above the massive fireplace, antlers still as vicious and lethal as they had been when the deer had been alive. Green Christmas garlands wrapped around the wooden beams and posts.

  Kitt squeezed into a space beside a fat post and a woman wearing entirely too much patchouli, a scent where any amount constituted too much. Mae tucked herself to his left. He gritted his teeth and shuffled forward, a little closer to her. “Ten minutes,” he whispered.

  Hector, salt and pepper hair in a plait, stood at the front of the stone fireplace, a projection screen to his left, a podium and laptop to his right. He spoke with what some linguists referred to as a ‘Rez accent,’ a slight sing-song quality to his intonation. “My good friend Julius collects three things: classic British sports cars, art depicting the cosmos, and wine. Perhaps the most famous work of Aztec sculpture is Sun Stone, the Stone of the Five Eras, it’s a late post-classic Mexica sculpture held at the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City. My friend Julius would love to have this piece in his collection of Celestial art, but this piece weighs about twenty-four tons. Jools has a love of the past, of history. He says people are bound to repeat the past if they don’t respect history.” Hector paused and looked out into the audience. He waved his hand motioning with one finger. “You folks in the back see this okay, can you all hear me? Come on up closer, there’s seats up here in the front. I don’t bite, but I might spit a little.”

  The crowd laughed and patchouli woman moved through, giving Kitt a little distance from the wooden post. He glanced at Mae. “You look cold.”

  “How can I be cold when your radiating, seething anger is keeping me warm?”

  A muscle in his jaw pulsed. “Ten minutes. We are staying ten minutes.”

  “You’ve made Hector very happy.”

  “Yes. Three cheers for grumpy me.”

  People settled into the front row, and Hector continued. “Okay. Okay. So, what’s this giant calendar stone got to do with Drunken Rabbits and Oenology? History, art, and wine are all intertwined. You can make wine out of anything. Pueblo and Zuni tribes used fermented corn, aloe, maguey—that’s agave—prickly pear and even grapes to make alcohol, but they didn’t make art about wine the way the Aztec did. Now, the Aztec hold a special place in my heart.”

  Impatient in spite of his controlled breaths and years of training, Kitt shifted his feet, right hand swinging to his side. Mae turned slightly, her fingers brushing his once, twice, absolutely on purpose before her hand disappeared into the sleeve of her dark coat. Tiny ginger and white dog hairs stuck to the black wool.

  Kitt crossed his arms, bumping into her absolutely on purpose. She transferred her weight, shuffling her feet, crossing her arms, too, tucking her right hand under her left elbow, the tip of her index finger circling around his. Despite his irritation, he caught her faint grin in the periphery of his vision and slid a fingertip to the vee between two of her fingers.

  “My people, The Tewa,” Hector moved to the next slide, a woman with a piece of pottery, “were not winemakers. The Drunken Rabbits Winery is very small and family run. We produce high-quality limited release Côt Noir or Malbec that rivals the Chateau Lagrezette Le Pigeonnier and Vina Cobos Marchiori Vineyard Malbec. My people are best known for their black polished and red polychrome pottery, but my family are sculptors and now winemakers.”

  Hector advanced to the next slide, a group photo of happy, smiling faces. He used a laser pointer. “This is my family,” he said, and the green dot moved as he pointed. “My daughter, my nephew, my sister, my wife. My wife is Nahua, some say Mēxihcati, others still prefer Aztec. The pretty redhead beside her is her art dealer, Ruby, and the bald man with the Santa beard? That’s one of our dear benefactors. We decided to name our first vintage after him. This is for you, my dear friend.” The slide changed to a bottle of wine, the white label a stylised yellow Aztec Rabbit inside a red triangle, Chichiltic printed beneath.

  A raucous haw-haw-haw lofted from the seated audience.

  “Feck,” Mae murmured.

  Kitt’s fingers closed around her elbow and he stared through the crowd, eyes halting on bearded Milton Foley’s shiny bald pate and a heart-shaped port-wine birthmark.

  “I’M TRYING TO PUT THIS together, but I have no idea how any of it fits.” Mae’s elbow throbbed from where Kitt’s thumb had dug in and led her out of the Fuller Lodge. She rubbed the smarting spot through her coat sleeve.

  “Both hands on the wheel, Mae, especially in this weather.”

  Deliberately, she placed her hands at ten and two on the steering and checked the rear vision mirror. A battered, old, yellow Honda hatchback and jacked-up Dodge pickup travelled behind them. The heaviest traffic was going up the Hill, west to Los Alamos. Their route twisted down the plateau, the countryside snowy and picturesque, cars few and far between.

  Kitt paid no mind to the beautiful and rugged landscape, his focus on the phone’s screen and the information he found on Milton Foley.

  “Did you meet Foley at the New Year’s Eve party?” Mae said.

  “Yes, and I danced with his wife.”

  “Is there anyone’s wife you didn’t dance with that night, Kitt?”

  “Foley’s a furniture retailer, owns a chain of stores across the American Southwest, and a museum of Biblical Art in Albuquerque.”

  Mae slowed. Snow had fallen more heavily southeast of Los Alamos. An icing of white stuck to the green and brown road sign. A dirty, orange plough cleared the road in front of them, pushing a white blanket to the pavement’s edge, red soil spraying out from the sides and back end, sifting the dirt onto the snow. “Nash was a Premier League player, but he collects antiques. Is that the connection?” she said.

  “I thought the same thing.”

  “What else have you thought?”

  “Hector Rodriguez is a sculptor and Taittinger’s passing fake artefacts as originals.”

  “Yes,” Mae said slowly, staring at the road, mulling over the idea. “Makes sense why there’s been an allegation of Taittinger’s counterfeiting. You think Judith or Nash is the origin of the suspicion? Or maybe...” The plough and the Dodge veered off to the left, she veered right, the yellow car taking the same route. She turned and looked at Kitt. “When you were dancing with Mrs Foley, did she mention she and her husband ar—”

  “The road, Mae.”

  Her eyes moved back to the windscreen. The wipers tick-tocked, sweeping away red-tinged wet spatter. “Hector’s wife doesn’t like Foley,” she said.

  Kitt pressed his mobile to his ear, eyes flicking from the road to the side mirror, to Mae, to the trimmed-down fingers on his left hand. “Get your things together, Reed. You’re going to meet Bryce...Yes, everything...” The connection faded out and in. “I said everything...you’re dropping out... About fifteen minutes... Who’s awake... Yes, I know what it means. It means I could have had scrambled eggs.”

  Mae exhaled and shifted in her seat.

  Kitt glanced at her and she dug into the pocket of her coat. “I found, we found Milton Foley...yes, the bald bloke with the birthmark and laugh...” Paper rustled. Kitt looked at Mae again. She had one hand on the wheel and a small paper packet in the other, the rounded edge of a bagel poked out of the top. “Find what you can, anything you can. Grant had mentioned connections to a family somewhere in the southwestern part of the US. My guess is it’s Foley...” The connection dropped, the call going dead. He shoved the phone in his jacket, reached out, took the bagel, and bit into cinnamon, orange, and cranberry-infused bread. Crumbs fell onto
the crown of the cowboy hat on his lap.

  A smug little grin tilted up Mae’s mouth.

  “You were holding out on me?”

  “I forgot I had it in my pocket.”

  “Forgot like you forgot not all the eggs were hard boiled?”

  She was quiet for a moment. A pickup truck laden with discarded Christmas trees ready for the dump rumbled past in the opposite direction and then Mae rumbled herself. “Jaysus, eat it already. I bought the damned thing when I got my coffee. I meant to give it to you, but the potential of you poisoning Bryce seemed a more pressing matter so I forgot about it.”

  Kitt had another bite, a savage one, and chewed the food as he chewed his anger and frustration and confusion, and she went on wearing that smirk, and he said it without thinking, “Do you love me, Mae?”

  “Do I love you?” she snapped. “Whom else would I love, Reed? Bryce?”

  “Caspar.”

  Mae exhaled, exasperated by his petty childishness and her inability to rein in her own petulance. Sixes and sevens, that’s where they were again, that’s where they were still, and that’s where they would stay until this mess finished. She looked at him.

  He looked back at her coolly.

  Her eyes shifted back to the curve of the road ahead and she was struck by remorse and surprise. Those things he’d said about being more fascinating than Caspar, about the wedding ring and silver-framed photo... With the shock of his being alive, the anger over the necessary contrivance of his being dead, she’d never thought to consider a man as confident as Kitt could feel insecure, perhaps even a little jealous over a dead husband. Yet he was uneasy with the love she’d always carry for Caspar. Man. Bully. Hero. Saviour. Liar. Kitt was all those things. He was also human. He was a vulnerable man with human vulnerabilities and he needed...reassurance. Fear and anger had robbed her of compassion, blinded her to human frailty, to his frailty. She was still scared, still angry, yet now she saw how she had failed him.

  Irritated, with him, with herself, she swallowed, her voice thick. “You believe I’ve held back because of a dead man.”

  “Mm-m.”

  “Caspar’s not my ghost. He’s yours. I told you, my holding back is because I’ve been so afraid. Not afraid of you or afraid of what you do, but afraid for you. Marriage is a promise, one I can make, but I don’t think you can. It’s grow old together, ‘’til death’ we part, only your death may come sooner than later.”

  “You have that little faith in me?”

  “However stupid, however irrational, I love you, Hamish. I’m in love with you, and you do what you do for those reasons you said you have. I haven’t thought what if, I’ve thought when, and I need to change that, I nee—what a feckin’ tool!” she shouted suddenly, and downshifted when the little yellow hatchback began to overtake them, another car in the oncoming lane. The Honda hatch fishtailed briefly, pulled ahead, and sped off, disappearing over a crest.

  The wipers tick-tocked. The heater whirred. The tyres hummed along the wet pavement. Piñon dotting the undulating roadside landscape swish-swished by. The paper packet crumpled in Kitt’s hand. He put it in the console between the seats, next to the romance novel.

  Two minutes passed and expanded to three. Then to four.

  “I apologise,” he said finally. “I’ve been a jackass.”

  Mae’s eyes burned as she watched the road. “I’m sorry I was short with you.”

  “I deserved it. I was a prick, and I like when you call me out for being a prick.”

  She dabbed at the trickle at her nose. “You do, don’t you.”

  He turned to her. “Yes, I do. I always have. I love that you never let me get away with anything. Do go on with it.”

  “I’m sorry I haven’t told you I love you,” she said, eyes on the task of driving as she approached a rise in the roadway. Perhaps this was as simple as he’d said, and that, in spite of what he was, with the gratifying nature of what she’d done, with the way she struggled with the morality of her actions, with what she feared, ‘I love you’ was the only truth that mattered.

  “I just wanted to hear you say it. These last months, with everything so uncertain I needed to hear something true.” He bit into the bagel again, chewed and swallowed. The mobile vibrated in his pocket. “Why doesn’t Hector’s wife like Foley?” he said, digging about for the phone.

  “Something about fundamentalist biblical literalism and an ultra-right-wing take on Christianity. Or maybe it’s how Foley laughs. Jaysus, that laugh.”

  Kitt read the link Reed had sent before the phone lost connectivity, eyes scanning the news article. “Perhaps it has something to do with Foley opening a second religious museum in Phoenix this Easter.”

  “You think he teamed up with Taittinger, Nash, Basil or all three of them?”

  “Ah, I don’t know. I had hoped you’d have figured it out so I could cease being—”

  “A prick?’

  “I was going to go with overtired, over-worked, sloppy, little crybaby.”

  She sighed. “I’ve come to realise that things like this always end in tears,” she said, downshifting and slowing, suddenly, “or a car accident.”

  Kitt followed her line of sight. “Oh, goody.”

  Up ahead, the yellow hatchback that had passed them earlier had skidded sideways. stopping across the south-bound lane. A large Christmas tree, still wrapped with gold tinsel, lay split and scattered across the pavement. A piece of splintered trunk and branches lay atop the little car’s bonnet. Pine boughs poked out from beneath the chassis. Motor still running, the door opened. A dark-haired man lurched out and sagged against the car, chin-length black locks blowing about his face.

  “This is strangely reminiscent of my most recent Christmas tree experience.”

  “Yes, except you said there was a blonde in a little sports car, not a man who shit his pants and is cradling a broken arm, dislocated shoulder...or an infant. Oh, my God.” Mae pulled to the side of the road, stopped, cut the engine, and hit the hazard lights.

  Kitt swore and handed Mae the half-eaten bagel. “Please, check for a first-aid kit. Hopefully, we won’t need it, but...” He opened the door and swung out, a gust of chilling cold lifted his jacket as he shoved his useless phone back in a pocket.

  The stocky man turned slightly, the rear of his bright blue jacket emblazoned with the white ES of the El Salvador National Football Team. Bagel in one hand, Mae felt around under the driver’s seat and found nothing. She leaned across the console, fished beneath the passenger seat and her fingers knocked against a small box, pushing it back farther. She knelt and squeezed between the seats, arse in the air. Her hand closed around the box and the sound of tyres spun on wet pavement, the Honda’s engine gunned. She straightened and Kitt slammed shoulder-first into the Ford’s windscreen, blade of a hatchet turning the glass to a layer of spiderwebs beside his ear.

  Swearing, Mae scuttled out of the car backwards. Kitt tumbled down and off the end of the bonnet, hatchet smashing a crease in sky blue metal. She dropped the first-aid box and snatched up a small Christmas tree branch trailing a gold foil garland. A frigid gust blew back the violent lumberjack’s hair, revealing a mashed nose and colouring like an indigenous Native of Central America—or El Salvador, like his football shirt suggested.

  Kitt rolled to his feet and stepped toward the man swinging back the hatchet. Mae shouted, and in an instant, everything moved at a crawl. Lethargic images winked from one to another, every sluggish blink of her eye a new tableau.

  Kitt caught the man’s forearms.

  Her feet pushed forward through thick marshmallow air, knees bending through marmalade.

  Kitt had twisted the man’s body and the hatchet behind his back.

  The branch she hoisted to her shoulder moved like a spoon in cold honey.

  Hands drifted to the back of the man’s neck, and the crown of Kitt’s head lazily ploughed into the Salvadoran’s rosy-brown face.

  A long-flowering, distorted screa
m of pain warbled and droned. Then time knocked back into place and the high sound pierced the air. The hatchet thunked to the pavement, shaggy black hair bounced and blew in the wind as the man sagged. When Kitt let him go, he reeled backwards, left and right, bumped into shin-high, reddish-tinged snow piled on the edge of the road’s shoulder, and stumbled toward the roadway, his breath billowing out in steamy clouds.

  Bagel still in hand, Mae dropped the short stick and puffed just as heavily. Kitt, unaffected, void of expression, as if nothing had happened at all, stood still, blood stippling his forehead, watching the man spin, lurch a few steps, and sink to his hands and knees, moaning.

  “Kitt.”

  “Stay there. Mae. Stay there,” he said, not looking at her. “Smart. Very smart set up. Ingenious actually, to use what was on hand. I got within four paces of him before I noticed it had all been staged, that the tree had been crushed by something bigger, and they’d just thrown the bits of trunk and branches around and under the car. This section of road beyond White Rock isn’t heavily travelled at this time of year. Few people go to Bandelier National Park to see the kiva and homes of the Ancestral Puebloan people in this cold weather. That was lucky for you,” he stared at the man, “and fortunate for us.”

  “Are you hurt, Kitt?”

  “My pride is mortally wounded.” Kitt took three steps, rammed his foot onto the man’s back, driving him facedown to the ground. “I’ve dislocated a fingerling. And you promised you’d run.”

  “I would have...” she began. Mae’s stomach lurched as Kitt gritted his teeth and yanked a twisted quarter of a finger back into place. “...except no one had a gun.” She swallowed the sour taste in her mouth.

  With a groan, the man tried to lift himself, snow, blood, and dirt mixing on his reddish-brown skin and wet black hair. He collapsed, moaning and whimpering.

  Kitt glanced at her then back at the man. “Get in the car, Mae.”

  “I’m not going anywhere without you, and we can’t leave him here.”