“Really, Wander, I didn’t know clearly what he was goin’ to do.”
“How come? How could he ask you not to tell us, and you still not know?”
Frank nodded with that awful smile. “I’ve been askin’ myself that, actually.”
Wanda rose and walked unsteadily to the door, took her jacket from its hook, and wrestled it on. Coop tried to give her a concerned look, but her eyes swiveled unseeingly and she was gone.
Frank continued to Coop, “I almost spoke up when Louis did what he did. But I made a promise to your daddy, see? The gunshot woke me up, and I found him, and I unnerstood what he’d been tryin’ to say at the fire. So I made him a promise not to tell.”
Coop’s thoughts were in disarray. He pushed the button on the remote with finality to stop the noise, and this time Frank didn’t protest. “So all these years I’ve been takin’ care of you, thinkin’ you were suffering under the burden of having killed your own brother, you were lyin’ to me? I resigned you to die, and resigned myself to help you do it, and for what? Why, Frank? You could have lived a man’s life, not . . . this,” he spat, indicating, with a toss of his hand, his uncle’s great form on the floor.
Never had Coop seen such a strain on his uncle’s smile; never had it been so ugly. “Thought you kids might forgive me for somethin’,” he said, “but it looks like I had it ass-backward.”
“Looks like it,” Coop said, rising. “Don’t know if I’ll be able to scrape together the money for your food and beer this week, Uncle Frank.”
“That’s all right,” Frank said with a trace of pride. “I’ll be movin’ along shortly.”
“Where you gonna go?” Coop laughed and reached for his keys. “You piss yourself half the time I’m not here to haul your carcass over to the john.”
. . . .
THE DOCTORS REASSURED Lina that Jay would be okay, that he needed to be kept under observation for a day or so, and would be required to speak to the police anyway when he awoke; so she took Enrique home and slept. She rose in the early afternoon and ventured into Jay’s room. She sifted through magazines by his bed—sports and hot rods—and gently opened drawers to look through stacks of the clothes Jay insisted on laundering himself—at friends’ houses or at the Laundromat on the boulevard, she didn’t know. What would Jay need in the hospital? A car pulled up outside. Lina quickly closed the drawer and went to the front door.
Janet Van Beke was climbing out of her car. She didn’t come up the steps but turned to wait for a second car that approached down the lane. This car parked, and from it a man Lina didn’t know emerged. He went to Janet’s car, and the two carefully helped Jay out of the backseat. Janet wrapped one of Jay’s arms around her shoulders while the man supported the other, which was encased in an L-shaped cast. With their help, Jay hopped toward the house, heavy-footed and dead-eyed.
“What’s going on?” Lina demanded, coming out onto the porch.
“He’s all right, Lina,” said Janet. “Let’s get him inside, and I’ll explain.”
Lina held the door wide, then quickly cleared Enrique’s things from the recliner. Janet lowered Jay into it, and the man pulled the lever to elevate the footrest. “Okay?” he said, crouching close to Jay’s face.
“Uh-huh,” Jay answered through the gauze in his mouth.
“Janet,” said Lina in an urgent whisper, “what’s he doing here? They said he had to stay at the hospital.”
“Lina, this is Dr. Carlisle. Can we sit down?”
Lina nodded.
“Dr. Carlisle is the Padgetts’ family doctor—and ours, actually—and he felt it would be okay for Jay to return home.”
“Why didn’t they call me?” Lina asked. “They said they’d keep him there for observation and to talk to the police.”
“That’s just it, Lina. The Padgetts think it would be best to keep the police out of this, and so does Jay.”
“What do the Padgetts have to do with this?”
“Lina, don’t get excited.” Janet moved over and patted the cushion beside her. Lina reluctantly sat. “Jay’s going to be all right. That’s the first thing you need to understand. Dr. Carlisle will visit every day and check on him, and before long Jay will be good as new. And this will all be at no cost to you. Everything will be taken care of. Lina, we don’t know all the details . . . but Winston Padgett may have been involved in the attack.”
“Winston? He’s Jay’s best friend.”
Janet bit her lip and nodded.
“They could have killed him, Janet.”
Again, the woman nodded. She took a great breath and said, “Disgraceful. I know. There was lots of drinking involved, on everyone’s part.”
“That’s no excuse! They should—”
Janet placed her hand on Lina’s arm to stop it from gesturing. “On Jay’s part too, Lina. Liz Padgett is very upset. It seems that Jay may have tried to . . . hurt her . . . out by the lake.”
Lina was speechless, swimming in thoughts.
“You see,” Janet said softly, “if Winston Padgett gets in trouble, then so might Jay.”
Lina shouldn’t have looked to Jay. A real mother would have made this decision for her child, would have said, No, whoever did this to my child must pay. But Lina wasn’t Jay’s real mother, was she? Neither was Janet. The boy was motherless.
“Jay?” Lina said.
The white of one eye was marred with blood, and from its position under the puffy awning of its lid, it labored to follow the other in meeting Lina. The skin visible between the bandages on his face was taut and mottled, the color of different fruits: plums, berries, old bananas. The bandages themselves weren’t simply white; they bloomed yellow in the middle and were framed by a bloody crust.
This patchwork face composed itself and nodded.
THE SKY WAS clear, there was a cheery breeze, and the sun blazed in the chrome of cars. Wanda charged across Eula in the determined stride she had used six months earlier when she needed to escape her cravings. When she grew tired of men peering up from under the hoods of their cars in their garages, women turning from their gardening to stare at the crazy lady walking, she headed down an alleyway to the canal. As before, it rolled along in swirls and boils, collecting litter in eddies along its walls.
Her father had killed himself. It was something Wanda knew she would never be able to make peace with. When his death had been an accident, Wanda had been permitted a little fantasy in which her father had lived, and so her mother had never drunk, and therefore had also lived, and there hadn’t been the rift in the family, and Louis had lived, and they were all healthy and smart and had get-togethers in Sunnyridge Park with all the grandchildren, the way she saw big Mormon families do. Wanda didn’t visit this fantasy world often anymore, but it was there when she needed it. Until this morning it had been only a stray bullet that prevented it; the fantasy could have just as easily been reality—more easily, actually. It should have been.
But now she saw its awful opposite: her father had killed himself, and so had her mother, although she had taken a longer and less determined route. This was just how Coopers went. Louis had known this when he made his urgent walk to the river. Despair would track down Wanda too in the end.
She should have known. Hank himself had once sniffed and said, “Ain’t no such thing as huntin’ accidents.” He had meant that Uncle Frank had killed her father on purpose. But Hank knew nothing about it. Quietly, she had put that comment in the little treasure chest of things she would never forgive Hank for.
Suddenly Wanda realized that, out of habit, she was heading toward home. But Hank was there. For the first time, she was truly homeless. She had come close before, but this was the real thing. Her heart raced; she was panicking. She changed directions yet again and headed toward Tammy’s. Just one pill, to get her through today. It wouldn’t hurt the baby. It was just an aspirin, a really strong aspirin. Tammy herself—a nurse—had put it that way.
It took two rings of the doorbell, and
when the door finally opened a few inches, it was Tammy’s face, not Vincent’s, that appeared. “Yes?” Tammy said without her usual smile.
“How are ya, Tammy?”
“Fine.”
“Um, sorry I haven’t been comin’ around.”
“That’s all right.”
Tammy, who had always taken Wanda in with an almost-hungry hospitality, still hadn’t opened the door and seemed to look right through her. The same rush of displacement came over Wanda now as last night, when she had walked into her apartment: was this really Tammy? Of course it was, but it really seemed like Wanda had entered the land of opposites, and this was a grim replacement.
“Can I come in for a second?” Wanda asked.
“I’m real busy just now.”
“Just for a minute, Tammy? I kinda need to.”
“Thanks for droppin’ by, Wanda.” A square grin appeared on Tammy’s face, pushing back her chubby cheeks as though she were trying to show her back teeth to the dentist. Through these clinched teeth she added in a whisper, “Git outta here!”
Wanda looked over her shoulder, suddenly aware that someone might be watching. She looked back just in time to see the door close.
AN HOUR INTO her trip, Connie passed the farthest boundary of where she had taken Bill. Within two hours she was in territory she had never seen before. It looked a lot like home, though, the blond hills sometimes giving way to flat expanses of farmland. She went over a pass where sandstone domes showed at the hilltops as if they had been scalped. This was the only point at which she became uneasy, as the only evidence of human life here was the road she drove on and the power lines that dipped and crested endlessly at the periphery of her vision. A dust devil, so dense that it looked like flames where it licked the earth, slowly approached the road. Feeling a little silly, Connie pulled over to let it cross. The fire at its base went out, starved as it was momentarily by the asphalt, then it gathered strength again, the gap ascending the column like a bubble in a straw. The dust devil descended into a dry creek bed, where it scared an animal off up the hill, kicking at the air with white, paddle-like back feet. It was a jackrabbit, so big that Connie would have thought it a fawn if not for its ears, which pointed heavenward, straight as two rulers.
Connie crested a hill and breathed a sigh of relief. Magic Valley opened below her, a quilt of greens. One of the more populated areas of southern Idaho, Magic Valley seemed neither magic nor a valley. It was a wide plain of towns and potato fields along the Snake River, skirted by mountains so distant they were a ragged, purple line barely visible in the dusty haze. At its farthest end, Magic Valley crossed over into Utah; even more than Eula, this was Mormon country.
The air warmed as Connie descended, and she cracked the window open to smell a thinner, cleaner aroma than at home: potting soil, as opposed to manure. The crop here was potatoes alone, none of the smelly dairies or pungent alfalfa fields, and no sugar factory. She pulled down a dirt road between two fields, parked, and ate the spaghetti she had brought in a Tupperware container. Muddy water charged down a ditch, on which semicircular siphon tubes had been arranged at perfect five-foot increments. Each led from the ditch to a furrow. The sun shone on the field, causing the water in the furrows to sparkle like rhinestone necklaces laid out for display. It was pretty here, but as Connie drove on, the redundancy of the landscape began to make her uneasy. Farmland was comfortable to live on, but bleak to drive through. A rattling sound came from her engine when she took her foot off the gas, or was she imagining it? Her car was old. What if it broke down? In a place like this, she would be fine. Some younger version of her father would come by and give her a hand, or at least go call a tow truck for her. But what if she were stuck in a pass like the one she had gone over, or one steeper and more remote, in a place like Colorado? What if she was trapped by a rock slide? That happened all the time in the foothills of the Rockies, beyond Salt Lake. With a chill, Connie realized that she would have to cross a huge mountain range to get to Missouri.
An hour into Utah, the sun set. Connie pulled into a small motel called the Seagull Inn. She had hoped she would reach Salt Lake today, but it wasn’t worth the risk of falling asleep.
The motel manager was a little, brown-complexioned, pockmarked man dressed in black. He had an accent Connie couldn’t identify. He wasn’t Mexican; maybe he was Indian—the kind from India. When he offered to help Connie with her luggage, she let out a shriek of protest. Her overreaction was just nerves, but when she ruminated on it afterward in the room, with the door locked and the curtains drawn, it seemed extreme, offensive even, as if she feared the man because he wasn’t white. She would be sure to be sweet and appreciative in the morning, so he’d know she wasn’t prejudiced.
Connie lay on the bed fully clothed, hoping to calm herself and quiet the roar of the road that was still in her ears, before cleaning up and calling Gene. Within minutes, she was fast asleep.
WANDA RANG GIDEON’S doorbell. It was dark out. She had walked all day and had nothing to eat. She desperately needed something to put her mind at rest. Gideon had pills—not often, but sometimes—and if not that, one puff of pot wouldn’t hurt the baby. Her surrogacy contract said she wouldn’t do illegal drugs, but, then, Randy and Melissa had told her they thought marijuana should be legalized.
Maybe Gideon would have some cold pizza to eat.
Gideon opened the door and sneered. “Well, well, well. Wanda. Do I look like Mountain Bell to you? You keep comin’ here to use my phone, and I’m gonna start chargin’.”
“It’s not the phone, Gideon. Can I come in?”
He smiled with relish. “Why should I let you in when alls you do is make fun of me and put me down?”
“I got some money. Not much, but a little.”
Gideon glanced around, miffed, and Wanda realized she had violated the correct order of things. The times she had paid, it had always been after the chat and the transaction, in answer to a quietly stated fee—never first thing on the doorstep. “Come on in, then,” he grumbled.
“Sorry, it’s just, I had a real hard day is all.” Wanda resisted the urge to support her belly as she eased herself onto the sofa. She didn’t want Gideon to know she was pregnant, as to him it would be nothing but more gossip. “Family stuff,” she said.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Gideon said. His voice was frank, and Wanda wondered if she had somehow roused the rarely seen human being inside. As soon as Gideon was seated, his cat leaped into his lap, butted his chest, and ground its head there, back and forth. Gideon ran his hands roughly down the cat’s body and released puffs of fur into the air. The cat purred loudly, desperately, like an asthmatic, and with every breath, its pink anus, which was pointed at Wanda, went convex and concave.
“I was wondering if you had some pills lying around. Something to ease my mind.”
“Nope,” Gideon said.
“Then maybe we could smoke a joint? Like I said, I got money.”
Gideon shook his head gravely. “I don’t mess with that stuff no more, Wanda—smokin’ weed and poppin’ pills. I’ve moved on.”
“Moved on?” Wanda said quietly.
“I got somethin’ new.”
Wanda could see that he wanted her to say it. She acquiesced. “Gideon’s Bible?”
He nodded.
“What’s in it?”
“Different stuff.”
“Like what?”
He eyed her incredulously. “You think if Colonel Sanders was here he’d give you his secret recipe, just like that? Come on.”
“I just—”
“There’s eleven herbs and spices in there, arright?” Gideon shoved the cat aside, and it darted off. He reached down, pulled out the Monopoly box, and used it to plow a space on the coffee table. When he lifted the lid, Wanda caught a glimpse of miniature Ziploc bags—piles of them. Gideon took one of these out, and a mirror. He pinched the bag open and dumped out a small mound of yellowish powder. With one of the Monopoly game’s “
Chance” cards, he began to divide the powder into lines.
“I just don’t want nothin’ that’ll keep me up, Gideon,” Wanda said. “Nothin’ that’ll make me think more.”
Gideon barely acknowledged her. “This stuff’ll make everything all right.”
“I got lots to do tomorrow,” Wanda said.
“The way it works is, first one’s free, but I ain’t gonna waste my time describin’ it. Better to feel it for yerself.”
“I need my sleep.”
“Ask me no more questions, I’ll tell ye no more lies.” He held out to Wanda a plastic straw, cut short.
Wanda shook her head.
“Me first, then?” Gideon shrugged, ducked, and quickly snorted a line. He sat up and exhaled. “See? Smooth sailing. Cool as a cucumber. And it’s almost bedtime.” Again, he offered Wanda the straw.
She took it. She eased herself out of the sofa and knelt on the ground. She plugged her nostril with one hand and snorted the line.
A bleach-scented burn in her nose became a pain in her head, like the headache that comes from eating ice cream too quickly. Wanda pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead. Gideon’s mouth hung open and his belly contracted again and again in spasms of laughter, but it took a while for it to become audible. By that time, a surging in Wanda’s heart had overcome the headache—a powerful, positive surging. She was purring like that cat, breathing pleasure.
Gideon clapped his hands and whooped like a cowboy. “You kin sleep when yer dead, Wanda. Enjoy the ride!”
FOR A WHILE that afternoon Lina had kept the TV volume down in order not to disturb Jay’s sleep. The squares of light from the living room’s small windows climbed the opposite wall, lost their sharp corners, and deepened from white to amber, and Lina gradually turned the volume up to a normal level; it was apparent that nothing would wake him. His chest barely rose and fell under the sickly blue hospital robe. More than once, she went over to check for the faint bubbling sound his breath made in his nose. She drank two pots of coffee over the afternoon to stay awake. Despite Dr. Carlisle’s assurances, she feared Jay was close to death.
Lake Overturn Page 43
