Protectors

by Kris Nelscott

  “Can I see the room I’d have?” I asked.

  “Sure,” Lucy went back through the balcony doors, then waved her hand toward the left. “Let’s go through the dining room and kitchen, so you can see what a great deal this really is.”

  The dining area was good size, with a big table in the center, covered in books and papers. It too had excellent light, since the floor-to-ceiling windows extended to the edge of the dining room wall.

  A galley kitchen ran from the dining room to the hallway. The stench of rotting food was stronger here. Clearly, Lucy wasn’t the most hygienic of roommates. Judging from the pile of dishes near the sink, she hadn’t washed anything in at least a week, maybe more.

  I had no idea what the bug situation was here, but I knew in Chicago that any apartment with a kitchen this filthy was cockroach heaven.

  Lucy walked through the kitchen as if the smell didn’t bother her. The smell made the ham sandwich I had eaten earlier think of returning. I cupped one hand over my nose and mouth and followed her into the hallway.

  She turned left, away from the living area. Then she nodded at a door right beside the kitchen.

  “Bathroom,” she said.

  It didn’t look clean either. A mound of towels lay on the floor beside the tub. I didn’t want to turn on the light to see the condition of the sink or toilet.

  She pointed at the end of the hall. “That’s the big room. My dad put in a floor-to-ceiling divider if you want to see.”

  A floor-to-ceiling divider. I wanted to say, Wouldn’t that be a wall? but such a snide comment wouldn’t go with the role I was playing right now.

  “That’s the room the other two share?” I asked, mostly as clarification. I wanted to see Darla’s room, and then get out of here.

  “Yep,” Lucy said, “and if you’d come in here in October, it would be yours. But I think you can have Darla’s. Serves her right, if she comes back. Then she’d have to start all over in the roommate pecking order.”

  Oh, yeah, I bit back. You’re not a handful. You’re easy to room with.

  I smiled just a little to myself, glad I was following her so she couldn’t see that reaction.

  “This room would be yours,” she said, stopping outside the next door. “Right beside the bathroom.”

  Where you had to listen to everyone go by, the squeal of the shower as it turned on, and the continual flush of the toilet.

  “Mind if I go in?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Be my guest,” she said, then reached around the door frame and flicked on the overhead light.

  The room was a lot neater than the rest of the house. A full-size bed covered in thin pillows dominated. Surprisingly, it was made with almost military precision. A ragged stuffed dog leaned against one of the pillows and a hand-crocheted afghan rested across the foot of the bed.

  A closet filled with clothes stood open across from the bed. A desk was pushed up against the exterior wall, the chair slightly askew as if someone had just been using it. A pile of books held in place by bookends leaned against the wall, and one book, along with a legal pad and a pen, sat on top of the desk.

  A purse hung off the chair. A thin coat rested on a peg beside the door.

  “Wow,” I said. “It looks like she just left.”

  “That’s what her dad said.” Lucy sounded unconcerned.

  “But you don’t think so?”

  “She had a macramé purse, and it’s not here,” Lucy said. “And she wore these sandals that were usually kicked into the middle of the floor. I was always tripping on them when I came to talk to her.”

  I frowned. “She left with her purse and her shoes, but nothing else?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Lucy snapped. “I don’t inventory my roommates’ possessions. I have no idea what she took and didn’t take. But I thought she was coming back. She didn’t say she wasn’t going to pay July’s rent. She just didn’t.”

  I looked at her, letting her see that I was bothered by all of this. “Had she done this before?”

  “Who’re you? Her mother?” Lucy crossed her arms and leaned against the door jamb. Even though she sounded irritated, she didn’t act irritated.

  I was slowly beginning to realize that her anger was a cover for her own concern. She felt left out by the fact that her roommate had seemingly abandoned her without telling her why.

  “If I’m going to rent her room,” I said, “I should know if she’s coming back.”

  “If she was going to sublet to you, then she probably wasn’t coming back,” Lucy said. “But she didn’t say anything to us about subletting.”

  Because she hadn’t planned on it, I wanted to say. I wanted to dump the entire lie now. But I couldn’t.

  “She didn’t meet me, though,” I said. “She never followed through.”

  Lucy leaned her head against the jamb.

  “It’s really weird,” she said. For the first time, she sounded vulnerable. “She should’ve said something. I don’t even know when she was last here. I think I remember her going out at breakfast back in June, but I don’t know. It might’ve been some other day. Or she might not have come home for a couple of days. We all agreed that we wouldn’t keep track of each other. That’s what our parents did, and we’re grown-ups now. So we didn’t.”

  Then she hunched her shoulders forward and added, “I didn’t.”

  My mouth opened slightly. She felt guilty about Darla’s disappearance.

  “You think something happened to her?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Lucy snapped. Then she sighed and added quietly, “I really don’t.”

  22

  Eagle

  With trembling fingers, Eagle pulled out her keys and unlocked the door to her apartment. Then she stepped inside, closed the door, and locked all of the locks.

  The interior smelled like someone had dumped an entire bottle of bleach down the kitchen sink and hadn’t bothered to run water over it to clear out the stench. So much for fooling the cops yesterday. They probably wondered what she had to hide.

  Of course, seeing the saggy couch, her red-lined eyes, and the scratch marks all over the battered coffee table, had probably told the cops exactly what she was hiding. Looking at this room from their perspective meant they had probably given her more respect than she deserved.

  Her face flushed. She sat down heavily. She didn’t want to leave again. If only hiding here were an option. And she supposed it was, if she wanted to stay drunk all the time. Drunk, not stoned. Because if she stayed stoned, her brain would examine everything closer and closer, with a pothead’s paranoia, and she’d end up even more upset.

  She didn’t dare stay drunk. Not and keep what little self-respect she had left.

  She got up and opened the windows. She had to get the bleach smell out of here. A warm breeze came in, along with the faint sound of bongos. That player had tireless energy. Either that, or he had traded off with someone else.

  She pulled out the paper and unfolded it, the names crystal clear in her neat handwriting. Too many names to go into a hospital without an appointment, files, or some hand-written authorization. If she went to a hospital in person, they might want to see some form that gave them permission to release a record.

  Not that most hospitals cared about the paperwork, in her experience. They’d tell anyone anything, provided the person had the right credentials. She had good credentials, good enough to fool most record departments if she were requesting one record.

  But she’d be asking for twenty, and no one would look the other way for that.

  Then an idea struck her. If she stayed here and worked the phone, she had a way to talk to records—at least for the male names on the list. Female names would be harder. But she could come up with something.

  She went to the ratty desk that sat at the far end of the living room. She opened a drawer, removed a yellow legal pad, found a working ballpoint pen, and then went into the kitchen. Unfortunately, the telephone was attached to
the wall, so she would have to stand. Standing would probably make her sound more formal, anyway.

  She grabbed the Bay Area phonebook. She preferred it to the Berkeley phonebook because it gave her more resources. She flipped through the yellow pages to hospitals and clinics, saw all the free clinics listed, and winced. Some of these places she might have to visit in person after all.

  But not with her uniform on.

  She decided to start with the least likely hospital. San Francisco General, a teaching hospital that was far from the UC Berkeley campus. She’d done some work at SFGH and knew it to be both cutting edge and rigid at the same time. Dealing with their records department would help her practice her spiel.

  She dialed the general number and asked for records. As her call was transferred, she leaned against the wall, envisioning the dark corridors of the ancient building where the records were.

  The phone rang a few times before someone picked up.

  “Records, Waldon,” a male voice said.

  “Hello.” She made herself sound tired. It wasn’t much of a stretch. “I’m Rita Hall with the U.S. Army Recruiting Office. I’m trying to track down some records to see if they’re legitimate. Are you the person I can talk to for this?”

  “Depends,” this Waldon said. “What exactly do you need?”

  “I have paperwork in front of me for six young males who are trying to be classified 4-F. We’ve had a lot of phony paperwork come our way lately, and so I’ve been assigned to see if these young men have visited your hospital and if so, what exactly they were treated for.”

  “You don’t got a doctor’s slip?” Waldon asked. He finally sounded a little interested.

  Eagle cursed silently. He knew how the military system worked. The military system needed a doctor’s release for a 4-F classification. Often that was just a first step. But it was an important one.

  “Oh, we have that,” she said. “But these days too many doctors here have made a side business of selling their signatures to help wealthy young men avoid the draft.”

  She paused, hoping for some kind of reaction. There was none. She then suspected that this Waldon knew that.

  “So, we’ve started requiring additional paperwork where possible. We’ve had the boys fill out a list of surgeries, emergency room visits, X-rays, along with dates—”

  “I am not looking up a pile of paper just for you, lady,” Waldon said.

  She smiled. His reaction was exactly the one she had wanted. Because she could have had him go through each file, procedure by procedure, or she could get him to comment generally.

  “I don’t blame you,” she said warmly. “I got assigned this duty just this week, and I have to say, it’s not the most exciting job I’ve ever had.”

  He didn’t chuckle or even make a sound. She wished he had.

  “But,” she said, “the woman who trained me said that we can short-circuit the procedure by having you look up a patient’s records by name, and then confirming the last visit the patient made to the hospital. In theory, our records should match, or at least come close.”

  He sighed. “Technically, I’m supposed to have you come down here and fill out some forms before I give you that information.”

  “I know,” Eagle said. “But considering the day I’ve had, I have a hunch that would waste even more time for us. Because I suspect you probably don’t have a lot of these names in your records.”

  He grunted. Either that sound was a half-laugh or a sound of disgust. She couldn’t tell without seeing his face.

  “Why don’t I just give you the names that I have? I don’t even have to give you date of birth, because all of these young men are between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, draft age. That would be birth years 1944 to 1951.”

  “Sounds so easy. You should see the files down here,” he said.

  “Oh, I have,” she said. “That’s why I don’t want to come down if I can help it. You’re not alone down there, are you?”

  “If I say yes, will you hang up?” he asked, letting her know just by his response that someone else was there as well.

  “If you’re alone down there, I’ll hang up after I give you the names,” Eagle said. “And then I’ll call you back.”

  He muttered something under his breath, then he said, “Hey, Sophie, need you to handle the phones and desk for a while.”

  Eagle couldn’t hear Sophie’s response, but it must have been affirmative because the phone made shuffling noises, and then he said, “Okay, how many names we talking?”

  “Six.” Eagle decided not to give him the girls’ names because that would just confuse the matter. She needed a different scheme for those.

  “Fire,” he said.

  She read off the names, spelling them and claiming, if he asked, that she couldn’t always read the handwriting she was working off of. He seemed to understand.

  When she finished, he said, “Here’s what I’ll do. I’m just going to pull the files that I find and bring them back. Then we can compare dates.”

  She bit back a half-second of annoyance since that was how she had explained the plan to him. But then she realized that it would be better if he thought it all was his idea anyway.

  He didn’t put her on hold. She wasn’t sure the phones down in records had that capability. Instead, the phone clunked on the other side and then she heard some faint music. It sounded like Frank Sinatra, but she couldn’t be entirely sure.

  She didn’t hear much else for several minutes. While she waited, she wrote down his name and Sophie’s name, then circled them, and drew little sparklers coming off the circles.

  By the time the phone clunked again, Eagle had nearly worn a hole through the top page on the pad.

  Without preamble, he said, “I don’t got any of those names, unless you were mistaken about age. I got a seventy-five-year-old under one of the names, and he’s got some heart condition. He came in a year ago for a heart attack. Dunno if he’s still alive or not.”

  She almost thanked Waldon cheerfully, and then caught herself just in time. “You’d better give me that name,” she said. “In case we have someone using fake records.”

  He did, and she dutifully wrote it down, not that she thought it mattered. The name was common enough.

  “You’re sure you have no others?” she asked.

  “Positive,” he said. “I double-checked the files. Unless something is upstairs right now, none of your guys have been here according to our records. You sure they were at SFGH?”

  “No,” she said, “I’m not sure. That’s why I’m double-checking. Half the records just say San Francisco. I was taking the easy route, and hoping that they meant SFGH, not some other San Francisco hospital.”

  “You in the San Francisco office?” he asked, as if he knew it.

  “No. I’m at headquarters,” she lied. “I get all the paperwork that they don’t know how to handle.”

  “So your documents are coming from all over the Bay Area?” he asked.

  “Looks like,” she said. “Although this bunch seems to be mostly from Berkeley.”

  He snorted. “Figures. No wonder they had you check everything.”

  Finally, she knew where he stood politically. Although it was too late in the conversation to help her much.

  “These college kids,” he said, “they don’t know nothing about the Bay Area. They think it’s all San Francisco. There actually might be records, but they could be in Oakland or something.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “I’d just blow it off if I were you,” he said, “and deny them all, send them over to Vietnam so they know what a real war is like.”

  It’s not a real war, she almost said, a reflexive, sarcastic response, based on the fact that no one had ever declared Vietnam a war, just a police action. Except it was a real war.

  People died.

  She took a shaky breath. “Thanks for your help.”

  “No problemo,” he
said. “Glad I don’t have your job.”

  Glad I don’t have yours, she thought, but didn’t say. Instead she hung up and stared at the names.

  Her scheme would work, at least for the male names. She’d need something else for the female names.

  And she would have to do it at different times. After that conversation, she couldn’t call Waldon back immediately and ask for the girls’ records. She’d have to wait until early morning, when a different employee manned the desk.

  She tapped her ballpoint pen on the legal pad. When she had volunteered to check hospitals, she had had no idea how much legwork that would entail.

  For a brief moment, she wondered if the effort was worthwhile. Then she remembered those desperate screams for help.

  She bent her head over the phone book and looked for the next number to call.

  23

  Val

  Lucy stared at me, her green eyes wide and open for the first time since I’d arrived. Her admission that she had no idea what happened to Darla had calmed the anger that seemed to come up every time I spoke Darla’s name.

  That, and the fear my question had provoked in Lucy. Underneath all that bravado, she was terrified.

  She still had her arms crossed, and the side of her head touched the door jamb to Darla’s room. I was deep inside it, near the perfectly made bed. The room smelled faintly of vanilla candles, even though no one had been here in a month.

  “So much could’ve happened, you know?” she said, “It’s been really scary down here since, like, January. And then all the riots and tear gas and stuff. Darla was pretty freaked out. We got gassed in our own apartment. I mean, I was sitting on the balcony when that helicopter flew over and dropped the gas. I had to go to the emergency room. Darla took me. She wasn’t feeling much better, but she helped, you know? She kept saying it would be all right.”

  I didn’t say anything, just waited. I was glad I hadn’t been here in May when all of this stuff went down.

  “She was wrong, you know? It wasn’t all right. There were, like, cops and military everywhere. I wanted to go home, but Daddy says Sanders aren’t quitters.” Sanders must have been Lucy’s last name.