Multiple Wounds

by Alan Russell

  Cheever gave up on his radio search. Nothing sounded right tonight. He turned to his silent passenger and wondered what she was thinking about. Should he offer her a penny for her thoughts? In her case it might end up costing him closer to a quarter.

  “So,” he said, attempting a casual voice, “what did you do last night?”

  She shrugged. “I was out of it.”

  “Out of it where?”

  “Who knows? I had a brief awakening around last call.”

  “Where was that?”

  She hesitated before answering: “Sibyl’s.”

  Ironic, he thought. “Sybil” was arguably the most famous multiple of all time, while Sibyl’s Down Under was a club on Fifth Avenue in downtown San Diego.

  “You don’t sound certain.”

  “They were out. Not me.”

  “They?”

  “I think Eris. And the Maenads. When they’re doing heavy clubbing, I always feel it the day after.”

  Cheever remembered that the Romans had referred to the Maenads as Bacchanites, women who were frenzied with wine. There was a fierce ecstasy associated with them.

  “Do you remember what time you arrived at Sibyl’s?”

  “No.”

  “Did you go anywhere from there?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t remember anything?”

  She shook her head. “It’s almost like sleepwalking, I guess. I just don’t remember.”

  “And when did you hear about Bonnie Gill’s death?”

  The silence (Pandora again?) answered. Cheever didn’t say anything for a minute or two, hoping that she would grow tired of the quiet, but she didn’t. His weariness was deep. He opened a window, let the air play on him. He pretended it was water rushing over him and closed his eyes for a moment.

  “Where are we?”

  The voice woke him up, shook him even. It was a little girl’s voice. Not an adult playing at being a little girl, but the real thing. He knew. He remembered.

  “We’re driving toward downtown San Diego.”

  Silence.

  “In California. In the United States of America.”

  “You’re silly, Daddy.”

  She was applying the knife now, and she didn’t even know it.

  “I’m hungry, Daddy.”

  “We’ll stop and get something,” he heard himself saying.

  Cheever detoured over to University Avenue. He passed a number of fast-food sites, rejecting them for one reason or another, and finally wondered what the hell he was doing. It wasn’t like he was really driving a little girl around. He turned right on Twenty-Ninth Street and pulled into the Jack in the Box on Dale and Upas.

  “What do you want?” he asked, hesitating for a moment before adding, “Caitlin.”

  “I want a hamburger, french fries, and a milkshake.”

  “What flavor?”

  “Choc-o-late,” she said loudly.

  He repeated her order into the speaker, without quite so much emphasis on the milkshake flavor, then drove to the window for the pickup. “Remember the ketchup, Daddy,” she said.

  The fast-food attendant heard her request, tossed some ketchup into their sack, and also tossed a questioning look. Helen was young enough to be Cheever’s daughter, but far too old to be talking like a five-year-old.

  Cheever handed her the bag of food, which proved to be a mistake. Her intentions were good, but she wasn’t very neat. As Hygeia, she had bled on his seat; as Caitlin, she bled ketchup. She tried to be fastidious, but the ketchup packets seemed to be beyond her.

  She ate contentedly. There are times when children have their own world and are serenely complacent. He watched her in that self-contained mode, wanting to see some adult giveaways, wanting to be able to say that she was acting and that her persona was a fraud, but he couldn’t. She rang true. She was a little girl.

  “Is it good?”

  A barely perceptible nod in the dark, and back to eating. A minute later and he heard loud sucking on a chocolate shake. Then he heard other sounds and tried to place them.

  “Don’t blow bubbles,” he said. The noises stopped.

  As Cheever neared headquarters, he began to worry about the situation. He couldn’t just let her get behind the wheel of her car in this condition, could he? It would be like child endangerment.

  He wasn’t the only one worrying. “You didn’t eat anything, Daddy.”

  “I wasn’t hungry, honey.”

  His answer, and everything in it, the soft tones, the endearment, came out without thinking. He should have challenged her “Daddy” from the first, should have distanced himself from her manipulation.

  “Are you tired from work?”

  “Yes.” He stopped himself from adding “sweetie.”

  “Poor Daddy.”

  Her words hurt too much. He changed the subject. “What did you do today, Caitlin?”

  “Nothing.”

  Cheever remembered that catchall answer from the past. “Did you play?”

  “Yes.”

  “With friends?”

  “With Dolly.”

  “Who’s Dolly?”

  Accusingly, she responded, “You know who Dolly is.”

  Probably a doll, thought Cheever, but he couldn’t help but wonder if Helen had an imaginary playmate or two. As an adult, she certainly had them. How far did her memories go back, he wondered, and in what personalities were they present?

  “Caitlin,” he asked, “do you know a woman named Bonnie? Bonnie Gill?”

  Her breathing changed; he could hear that. Cheever could almost feel someone—something—else emerge. A head turned and regarded him. The wide eyes of Caitlin, her innocence and trusting, were gone. Her departure left him feeling flat, as if something precious had been stolen from him once again.

  The woman next to him stretched out like a lissome cat. Her lip curled in mock amusement, and a knowing smile came over her features. The expression wasn’t quite evil, but it was a long ways from Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. She stretched out a hand to Cheever’s leg, felt along his thigh, massaging as she went. He felt a trail of heat work its way up to his crotch. Then he pulled away from her.

  “Hey,” she said, her tone equal parts mocking and sensual, “don’t you want to come out and play?”

  “Eris?” he asked.

  She laughed. “The one and only,” she announced, then reached for Cheever, tickled the back of his hair. “You’re cute,” she said, “for a cop.”

  He turned the Taurus west onto Broadway. “You’ve had dealings with the police?”

  “Here and there. They like to shine lights and speak big.”

  Her hand moved from Cheever’s hair down his arm, her fingernails lightly scratching. She reached across his chest, and her hand felt the bulge of his holstered gun.

  “Hey,” she said, “is that a pistol in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?”

  A goddess quoting Mae West.

  Cheever took her wandering hand and firmly placed it next to her side, but that only amused her. “Let’s play good cop, bad cop,” she said. “I’ll be the bad cop, and you’ll get good oral cop.”

  She reached for his zipper, laughed when he slapped her hand, then gave Cheever a look that said there was no worse sin than being a party pooper. Her attitude suggested she was the one in control, and he was the passenger along for the ride. She was more right than wrong. The woman was distracting. And intoxicating. He tried not to show that, but he sensed she knew it anyway.

  “Where’d you park?” he asked.

  “She parked on the next street. Make a right.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “VW Bug,” she said dismissively. “I’d want something with more horses under my legs.”

  She had a way of saying things that grabbed attention. It wasn’t only the promise of sex; cops were used to seeing that flashed all too often. In her eyes, and words, and movements were the promissory notes of an unforgettable
experience, with delivery only a hot breath away.

  Cheever pulled up behind the car. His headlights illuminated the bumper sticker: HUMPTY DUMPTY WAS PUSHED. He wondered which personality had applied the sticker on the Bug. In a way, it was appropriate for all of them. They were collectively Humpty Dumpty after the fall. He didn’t envy Dr. Stern. She was trying to do what all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t do: put Helen back together again.

  “Are you going to be all right?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “The question is, will you be?”

  She kissed two of her fingers, then reached over and touched Cheever’s lips with them. She manipulated the fingers slowly around his mouth, softly touching him. Her movements grew faster and harder, her fingers starting to press and twist into his lips. He reached up to push her hand away, but was slower to react than he should have been. Cheever couldn’t even be sure if he’d opened his mouth to her fingers or whether she had pushed them past his lips. She made small, appreciative sounds, until he pushed her hand away.

  “I’d like to go multiple with you sometime,” she said, opening the door and exiting his car in one lithe movement, and then shutting the door behind her with a push of her backside.

  She walked over to her car with the kind of fuck-me step that streetwalkers try to mimic but forever parade in a sad parody of the real thing. She was licentiousness with an attitude, insouciant and incorrect, and she reveled in it.

  Her VW started with a loud roar. It pulled away from the curb quickly, brazenly.

  Cheever’s head was spinning. He wondered about hers.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  Home to Orpheus. Cheever could tell the shrink had been curious about his knowledge of mythology, though she’d never inquired. She probably figured that by asking him an intimate question he was entitled to the same. The two of them, he thought, had a strange chess game going on.

  Where Cheever lived in Leucadia most of the streets were named after mythological characters. After traveling the roads for a few years he had become curious and started exploring the mythology behind the names. In time the streets became a little more than streets.

  The fog had settled along the coast, clustered thickly in some patches. Cheever passed by the streets of myths and gods, his way taking him by Athena, Vulcan, Diana, Jason, and Hermes, until he twisted around Glaucus, and descended down, down, just like Orpheus had done.

  Cheever had always thought it unfair that Orpheus Avenue didn’t intersect with Eurydice. The planners should have thought of that, should have made sure there was a Eurydice Street so that the star-crossed lovers could have at last had an earthly convergence. But there was no street named after her. Orpheus stood alone.

  “You look for portents,” Cheever whispered into the fog, “and you find them.”

  He turned on the wipers. The mist was thick. He thought about Orpheus and Eurydice and about himself, remembering love gone wrong and love lost and the failure of love to conquer all. Here it was the twenty-first century, and Cheever was still mulling over myths.

  Orpheus and Eurydice were in the first bloom of newlywed love when a snake bit her on the foot and killed her. Orpheus put his grief into music and both gods and mortals cried rivers, and even the wild animals lamented.

  Sorrow transports people to different places. Orpheus took his grief to Hades, his love and his lyre’s petition allowing him passage to a place where mortals dared not go. The dead are not allowed to leave the underworld. It was the law, and the law was as immutable as death, but Orpheus sang his case to the dark lord Pluto, and, in the end, even the king of the underworld relented. Eurydice was delivered to Orpheus on one condition: that he not look at her or speak with her until he was free of Hades.

  The ascent out of that dark place is long and difficult; very few have ever been delivered from there. Orpheus and Eurydice almost made it out. When he saw the lights of the upper world, Orpheus turned to shout the good news, and it was then that Eurydice was dragged back down to Hades by unseen hands. Orpheus could not forgive himself. Love had almost conquered death, but not quite. Death wishes are granted more easily than most. In a matter of days Orpheus died, and only then was he reunited with Eurydice.

  “And they died happily ever after,” said Cheever, staring into the darkness.

  He turned on his brights, knowing even as he did so that it was a futile measure against fog. It illuminated the shroud around him, but not the road ahead. Light wasn’t always the answer.

  Was Sappho’s Leucadia different than his own? The fog, Cheever decided, was obscuring reality, blurring time and events and taking away his footing. When he and his wife had split up twenty years past, Cheever hadn’t had any idea where to go, only knew that he wanted to move away from her and their La Mesa house, away from all the memories. He had ended up renting a place in Leucadia from a cop who’d gotten the home as an inheritance. After a few years of renting, Cheever had noticed a for sale sign on a nearby street. There had been very little to move.

  All roads lead to Rome. Cheever wondered if the Romans had stolen the saying from the Greeks, just as they had stolen their gods and just about everything else. He could hear Interstate 5, but not see it. The proximity of the freeway had made his house affordable. Creeping along, aiming for the center of Orpheus, Cheever finally made it home. He drove up his uneven driveway. The roots of his eucalyptus and avocado trees had broken through the asphalt and were turning the drive into an obstacle course. Rather than attack the roots, Cheever had been thinking about getting a four-wheel drive.

  He had bought the two-bedroom bungalow almost twenty years ago as a fixer-upper and had never done too much to change its status. His home improvements were always out of necessity, work done to keep the place standing. The bungalow had been built in the fifties; most of its contemporaries had been bulldozed, replaced by more expansive, and expensive, houses. Cheever liked it that the house was older than he was. So few things in Southern California were. It was a man’s house because no woman had ever lived in it for more than a night. Over the years the female guests had always emphasized the “charm” of the house and its potential. The general consensus must have been that the house had more possibilities than Cheever, as none of the women had ever stayed in his life very long.

  He didn’t blame them. He figured most self-help books were probably written for people like him, the same audience that didn’t buy them. One of Cheever’s few friends had told him he needed to learn how to build bridges. “That’s how you connect with people,” the friend had preached. But bridges were for those who wanted to get to the other side.

  Cheever was more outgoing on the job. You made cases by opening your mouth and getting others to do the same. Nothing was more important for a homicide dick than getting people to talk. His peers especially liked his confessor routine, with Cheever looking and acting like Father Flannery, speaking softly and tiredly to the suspects, pretending he cared about their mortal souls. Time had improved the fit, giving him mostly white hair, deep wrinkles, and sad eyes. The suspects were ready for tough, but not their parish priest. They didn’t want to disappoint him with more lies, but they discovered that the truth didn’t set them free. It got them convicted, not shrived. When they confessed their guilt, Cheever walked away. He didn’t think of that as a betrayal, but only as a part of his job. But sometimes it wasn’t as easy to separate work from life and just walk away.

  He didn’t like working on cases that involved the deaths of little children, but the team counted on him. They expected him to go into the interview room and do his act. He remembered one time he had been sent in to talk with two parents who had battered their child to death but weren’t owning up to it. He had offered the suspects smokes and Cokes and told them how he had four kids of his own and that he knew how necessary discipline was, and that the problem with society was that too many children didn’t get hit when they should, and that he could understand they had only done what
was necessary, but that they should tell him about it. And they had. He had nodded and listened, had never dropped his avuncular act, but he had kept his hands hidden under the table, hands clenched so hard that by the time all the talking was done, he couldn’t even pick up a pencil for hours.

  Cheever thought about Caitlin. The shrink had said she was five years old. To him, that was a cruel irony. Cheever had hoped Caitlin was the one personality he wouldn’t run into. Even before she emerged, he knew how vulnerable he was to her. Their first meeting had gone worse than he could have imagined. After she had called him “Daddy,” most of his brain had shut down.

  Cheever remembered how he and his wife Karen and their daughter Diane had checked into a hotel in another city to see yet another specialist. Diane had lost her hair by then. Sometimes she wore scarves. When she wasn’t so sick and tired she still cared how she looked. The desk clerk had asked how old she was, and Cheever had said five, and the clerk had said, “She’s free then,” and Diane had very indignantly said, “I’m five, not three,” not understanding that children six and under were free.

  Diane had died a few months later. She had been sick for two years with leukemia. Cheever had never thought she was going to die. There was always some promising drug or a remission just around the corner. His little girl never got better, but she never got bitter either. She had remained his little angel until the end. Sometimes he still imagined she was alive and five. He would replay their conversations in his mind word for word. “Daddy, why did the man throw a clock out the window? Because he wanted to see time fly.” That was one of the curses of his memory. There was this part of him always repeating the past no matter how many clocks he threw out the window.

  Time heals all wounds. He repeated the cliché like a mantra and tried to compartmentalize his grief. If there was a just law in the universe it should have been that parents could never outlive their children. He remembered the day he had broken down reading the epitaph of another little girl who had died too young, too soon. On her tombstone her father had chosen these engraved words: SO SOON DONE FOR, WHAT WERE YOU BEGUN FOR? That was a question Cheever had asked himself for so long. Where was the redemption? It used to tear him up inside when he’d hear other parents yelling out the name “Diane” to their little girls. That didn’t happen very often now.