Protectors

by Kris Nelscott

  Tears pricked her eyes. She needed to be busy, that’s what it was. If she was busy, she didn’t have time to think, didn’t have time to dwell, didn’t have time to feel anything.

  She pushed past a group of kids wearing ragged jeans and loose tops, reeking of incense and unwashed clothing. They didn’t even seem to notice her, and for that she was grateful. She wasn’t sure she could meet anyone’s eye at the moment.

  She had to skirt nearly fifty people on the short walk to A Gym of Her Own. She’d actually breathed a sigh of relief when she hit the alley, because it was empty. People were adding to that crawling sensation beneath her skin.

  The back door of the gym was unlocked, even though she told Pammy to keep the damn thing locked permanently.

  But did Pammy listen to her? Of course not. And someday, Pammy would regret it.

  Eagle shoved the door open and stepped inside. The scents of Lemon Pledge and Palmolive washed over her, chased by the smell of stale coffee. Eagle let the door bang closed, then she locked it, flicking her wrist hard, as if proving a point to Pammy, even though Pammy wasn’t present.

  She was probably teaching a class out front, and if Eagle went there to say hello, she’d be dealing with people. Dumbass housewives, who saw Eagle as some kind of freak, more of a freak than the hippie girls who came to the gym, because Eagle had gone to war.

  These women were trying to learn to be tough, yet they didn’t respect a woman who was tough, or who had been tough once upon a time, before something in her broke, and her brain wouldn’t stop playing the same goddamn tapes over and over and over again.

  She gripped the edge of the sink and made herself breathe. Fucking panic. Fucking senseless panic. She’d banish it if she could, but she didn’t know how. At least, she didn’t know how without alcohol or drugs or the sweet oblivion of a medicated sleep.

  She squared her shoulders and stood upright. Then she touched the handle of the percolator, still sitting on the stovetop. The burner was set on warm. The handle was too hot to touch. She picked up a crocheted potholder, vaguely wondered which of the bored housewives had brought that in, and then wrapped it around the handle, picking the whole thing up.

  She poured the old coffee down the sink, tossed the grounds into the garbage, rinsed out the percolator, and started assembling a new pot, just as the door to the kitchen opened.

  Pammy came in, smiling. How that woman always managed to find something to smile about, Eagle would never know. Sometimes she wanted to slap the smile off Pammy’s face, just because Pammy looked so goddamn ridiculous.

  And sometimes Eagle wished she could be as cheerful, even for a single afternoon.

  “I thought I heard someone in here,” Pammy said. “How’re—”

  “You got a class out there?” Eagle asked quickly. She had to make sure that Pammy never finished the question. Because if she did, then Eagle would be duty bound to answer it. Or to avoid answering it. Either way, Pammy would notice and pry like she had the day before, and Eagle wasn’t up to prying.

  Eagle was barely up to making fucking coffee.

  Pammy tilted her head a little, clearly seeing through Eagle’s ploy. Pammy’s smile shifted, fading slightly, taking on a tolerant air.

  “My beginners’ class is going to start in a few,” she said. “But I have a minute.”

  She opened a box on the countertop to reveal five plain donuts. Clearly there had been more in the box, but they had been eaten. And Eagle knew Pammy never brought donuts for the group. Pammy was all about healthy eating and proper lifestyles, and donuts, she believed, were good sometimes but never in the gym. But Pammy never said no to a gift either.

  She took one and set it on a plate. (Only Pammy would put a donut on a plate.) Then she put that plate in front of the chair that Eagle usually used at the table.

  “I don’t need sugar,” Eagle said, thinking that might make Pammy back off.

  “You need something,” Pammy said. “You’re moving like an old woman and you’re surly.”

  “I’m always surly,” Eagle said.

  “Surly-er,” Pammy said. “Eat.”

  Eagle ignored her, finished making the coffee, and set the percolator on the stovetop.

  “Stop taking care of me,” Eagle said.

  Pammy opened her mouth, probably to deny that she had been taking care of Eagle, then smiled slightly and raised one shoulder in yet another shrug.

  She took out a second donut and put it on a second plate.

  “Something weird happened this morning,” she said.

  “Someone landed on Mars?” Eagle asked, hoping she could deflect. “Isn’t it a little soon to change venues in outer space? Shouldn’t we explore the moon first?”

  Normally, if she brought up the space program, Pammy ran with it, expressing her disapproval at the financial waste—a rare political something that she and Eagle both agreed on. It was a safe topic, one guaranteed to divert the conversation.

  And Eagle needed to divert the conversation. She didn’t want to hear about weird. She just wanted to sit and wait until the housewives left so she could punch something. And she didn’t want to tell Pammy that, because Pammy would parade her out there and supervise as she put on the gloves and walked up to one of the girly punching bags.

  “I’m serious, Eagle,” Pammy said.

  Eagle felt her heart sink. Apparently, Pammy couldn’t be diverted today.

  “Some guy came in this morning.” Pammy sounded…uneasy? Alarmed? Uncertain? Eagle actually couldn’t tell.

  She looked over at Pammy to find the smile gone.

  “He threaten you?” Eagle asked, maybe a little too fiercely. It had happened before.

  “No,” Pammy said. “His daughter is missing.”

  Eagle let out a breath she hadn’t even realized she’d been holding. “I thought you get those guys all the time.”

  Pammy bit her lower lip. “Not all the time. Sometimes. And this one felt different.”

  Eagle straightened. “How come?”

  Pammy shrugged “They’d had the usual political rift. The daughter is the first in the family to go to college, I think, and got radicalized, and her parents don’t approve—”

  “So she dropped out and isn’t contacting them.” Eagle grabbed her donut. It was still soft, the chocolate frosting not even set yet. These were recent donuts. “So what?”

  “I don’t think it’s a so-what,” Pammy said. “She disappeared from her apartment one day. Left her purse, her identification, all her stuff. Her roommate called the parents, and now the father’s looking for her.”

  “This week?” Eagle asked.

  Pammy frowned at her. “What?”

  “Did she go missing this week?” Eagle sounded even more on edge than she felt.

  “No, no,” Pammy said. “Not this week. June sometime. Late June, after martial law got lifted. It sounded weird, Eagle.”

  Eagle bit into the donut. Not warm, but not stale either. Perfectly caked. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten, which was probably why the damn thing tasted so good.

  “Eagle,” Pammy said with a bit of urgency. “It was off.”

  “I heard you the first time,” Eagle said. “But it’s not the woman I saw. Sounds like this girl vanished a month ago.”

  “And that woman you saw is the only important missing person in the Bay Area?” Pammy asked with a bit of an edge. “I just thought it was weird that two women would go missing from the neighborhood—”

  “According to the police, my woman isn’t missing at all,” Eagle said. “She was probably involved in a domestic, and her husband had the legal right to use her as a punching bag.”

  She spoke around the bite of donut that she’d eaten, and that managed to moderate the bitterness somewhat. She didn’t want to hear about some other missing girl. She didn’t want to think about the woman she’d seen.

  “I’m not talking about the police,” Pammy said. “I didn’t even think to ask the guy if he’
d contacted the police.”

  “Maybe you should,” Eagle said, stopping herself before she added, if you care so goddamn much.

  Pammy frowned at her, the smile a distant memory. She picked at her donut, then ripped it in half.

  “He left a flyer,” she said, after she’d ripped one of the halves into thirds. “Maybe you could look at it.”

  “They’re not the same person,” Eagle said. “One month—”

  “And what if she got involved with some weird guy?” Pammy asked. “You know, like that weird guy that came through a couple of years ago, the guy with the eyes?”

  She had mentioned the guy with the eyes a few times. Just before Pammy had opened the gym in 1967, she’d seen a creepy short man with intense eyes who had scared the crap out of her and a friend. She had said if her friend had encountered him alone, he might have harmed her, but Pammy had taken a step forward, menacing him, and the creepy guy with the eyes had backed off.

  Eagle had never seen him. She hadn’t even been stateside when that happened. She always suspected that Pammy and her friend had merely run into someone who was tripping, but she had never said so. It had scared Pammy and was part of the origin story of the gym, and Eagle hadn’t wanted to question something so important.

  “There are a lot of gurus around right now, Eagle,” Pammy was saying. “Some of these kids are hooking up with seriously bad people. The drugs, the fake religions—”

  Eagle waved her hand, silencing Pammy.

  “I know,” Eagle said. She had put all of that into the I can’t do anything about it so I’ll ignore it category.

  “All I’m saying is maybe this girl dropped out for a month, had second thoughts, tried to get away—”

  “And the guy beat her for that?” Eagle asked.

  “People have been beaten for less,” Pammy said drily.

  She had a point. And she also had a determined look. Eagle recognized it. Pammy would keep pushing until Eagle examined the flyer and made sure the girl wasn’t the one Eagle had seen.

  “Okay,” Eagle said, trying not to sound as reluctant as she felt. “Bring it back here. I’ll take a look.”

  “Thanks,” Pammy said and got up. She let herself out of the kitchen, just as the coffee started to percolate.

  Eagle ate the rest of her donut, then grabbed a second one from the box. She finally remembered the last thing she’d eaten. Pizza yesterday. And she’d eaten it here, ironically.

  If anyone had asked her about where she ate most of her food, she certainly wouldn’t have said it was A Gym of Her Own.

  Pammy came back in, clutching the flyer. Someone had spent some serious money on it. It was professionally printed, the high school photograph in the center looking like it had been designed for the flyer.

  In big black letters at the top, it listed a Sacramento exchange along with these words:

  If You’ve Seen This Girl, Please Call.

  Under the photo, it said in smaller type,

  Darla Newsome. 5’4” 110 lbs, brown eyes, light brown hair.

  Then in even smaller type, it read:

  Darla went missing on June 22, 1969. If you know her, please have her call her parents. If you have any information, please call the number above. We don’t want to bother her: we just want to know she’s okay.

  Not a standard plea at all. And it touched something in Eagle. The Sacramento phone number, the willingness to believe that their daughter might have dropped out, the undertone of sheer terror.

  The photograph was next to useless, though. High school graduation shots were staged, and Eagle would’ve bet money that Darla Newsome didn’t look anything like that carefully made-up girl with her tentative smile, tilted head, pearls, and perfectly straight hair which ended in a perfectly rolled flip.

  “Have you seen her?” Pammy asked, carefully avoiding the is this her question.

  Eagle closed her eyes, tried to remember the image she’d captured in her memory of the screaming woman and compare it to the picture of the happy high school girl.

  Eagle had gotten a good look at the woman’s face, but it had taken a while for the image to register. She’d thought about it a lot that night as she waited for the cops.

  Eagle wasn’t sure she’d recognize the woman in any circumstance, because her face had already been bruised and swollen. She had had a fat lip, and maybe a cut along her jawline. Her hair had been tangled and her shirt ripped.

  Eagle tried to mentally measure the screaming woman’s height but it was nearly impossible. If she had to guess, the top of the cab was about six feet high, and the woman’s head hadn’t reached that.

  But the scumbag had held her by her hair, arching her back, and pulling her sideways. It was impossible to measure height from that. Plus, she kept lifting her legs and kicking, as if she were trying to get away.

  Maybe the woman had been five-four. Maybe she’d been five-seven. Eagle had no idea.

  But the woman had been thin. Her hair color had been impossible to determine, and Eagle hadn’t been close enough to notice much else.

  Eagle opened her eyes. Pammy was peering at her intently.

  “I have no idea,” Eagle said. “This photograph, professionally done, this girl, she could be anyone. Hell, one of the hippie-dippy girls I saw heading to the park this morning might’ve been her.”

  Eagle’s finger hit the flyer, tapping the photograph.

  “I mean, look at her. She probably ironed her hair before she curled the ends. And if she did that, there’s no way to know if her hair’s naturally curly or naturally straight. No one would dress like that down here, and—”

  “I know,” Pammy said. She sighed and took a tiny bite of donut. “I was just hoping…”

  “To solve two mysteries at once.” Despite herself, Eagle smiled. Pammy liked order. It would have been nice to wrap everything up in a neat little bow. But those things didn’t happen.

  The coffee finished perking. Eagle got up and poured them both cups.

  “I came here to punch something,” she said, as casually as she could. “I don’t suppose your students will leave right after class.”

  “This place is never empty on a Monday,” Pammy said, understanding what Eagle wanted. “There’s always someone around. You want me to help you?”

  Eagle almost said, Never mind, but she stopped herself just in time. She could stay, finish her donut, have some coffee, and maybe get rid of some of this panic, or she could go home, and get back into the cycle again.

  Intellectually, it didn’t sound like a choice. In reality, however, it felt like a mammoth decision. Leaving would be the easier path.

  But, Eagle reminded herself, she didn’t want easy. She didn’t need easy.

  She turned around, cups in hand, pleased that she wasn’t shaking. Pammy was staring at her with an expectant look. It took Eagle a moment to remember that Pammy had asked a question.

  “Um, no, thank you,” Eagle said. “I don’t need any help. Just need to blow off steam.”

  “Pretend the punching bag’s the truck driver,” Pammy said.

  “Yeah, I suppose,” Eagle said. But she wasn’t really thinking of him. She was thinking about the girl.

  She set the cups down, then sat, feeling the weight of the last two days on her.

  “We’re never going to find out what happened to that woman, are we?” she asked quietly.

  “Probably not,” Pammy said. “Or poor Darla either. It’s not really our business.”

  Eagle sighed. Always a good excuse. It’s none of my business. I was just following orders. I’m not in charge.

  “When does it become our business?” Eagle asked.

  Pammy broke another bit of donut apart. “When you figure out the answer to that,” she said quietly, “be sure to let me know.”

  10

  Val

  I stood on the edge of the mat, along with six other women, waiting for the class to start, getting more and more nervous by the minute. The women were all
bigger than me. I was too thin, and my skin was much darker than anyone else’s. Two of the women glared at me as they walked past without even saying hello.

  They went to what seemed like prescribed areas on the mat, leaving me and the other short woman in the back. At least, I’d call it the back. We were facing the far wall, through a thicket of punching bags and those little bags that looked like an upside-down balloon.

  The far wall had no windows on it—the only windows in the entire place seemed to be along the front, as if the gym had been a car showroom or something. But at least Pammy had moved the big mats away from the windows.

  The area back here was darker, partly because of the big punching bags hanging from thick chains from the ceiling. The big punching bags—all of the punching bags (even the upside-down balloons) hung lower than any I’d ever seen, so it felt a little like I was standing on a mat, staring into a forest of stubby upside-down trees.

  I didn’t mind the back. At least intellectually. Emotionally, I hated not being able to see the room behind me. It made me even more nervous.

  I wasn’t sure how I could be more nervous. I felt so terribly out of place, and now, with Pammy’s words echoing in my head, I felt guilty too.

  I can’t imagine anything worse than waiting for news of a missing loved one, news that might never come.

  I had never called Marvella or Paulette. I had let them know I was leaving town, but I didn’t tell them where I was going or why.

  Of course, I hadn’t known. But they were bound to be worried.

  I had put them out of my mind, like I had put Chicago out of my mind, like I had tried to put him out of my mind.

  Only I hadn’t been successful with him. He was why I did half the things I did. Like now. I looked over my shoulder to check the room behind me even though I knew I was safe.

  The big counter dominated the other part of the room. But without Pammy there, the counter didn’t seem like such a focus. Besides, the chairs that had been out yesterday were folded up and put away. The portable television with its gigantic rabbit ears was gone as well.