Only Flesh and Bones

by Sarah Andrews

  I burned my tongue on the muffin. My still-sleepy fingers spasmed, fumbling my coffee mug, sluicing scalding liquid across three magazines and a pile of unpaid bills. I grabbed a stack of tea towels and mopped away, but the contrariness of the universe being what it is, by the time I had them downgraded from sopping to simply damp, my muffin had grown cold as a tomb.

  I poured a second cup of coffee and sat down to wait for the jolt of caffeine I prayed would come, wondering how I could hope to readjust to an eight-to-five workday even if I got a job. Somehow it was no problem getting up in the morning, or the middle of the night, for that matter, when I was doing ranch work, or any other kind of work that took me out-of-doors, but the prospect of struggling into business clothes and plunking myself behind a desk for eight hours a day just made me want to dive farther under the covers.

  Pah. And here I was trying to get myself up for a nonjob interview with Fred Howard, just the kind of good ol’ boy creep I wanted to work for least. I laughed wearily into my coffee mug, wondering if the time I’d spent hanging out with het up feminists like Julia Richards was starting to poison me against working inside the patriarchal system which so grated on their nerves. Or was it some virus of discontent caught while reading Miriam’s journals that had me snarling at the thought of even talking to Fred Howard?

  Putting off the inevitability of finding a real job in favor of playing detective, I telephoned J. C. Menken, telling myself I should report in and maybe hit him up for some expense money. After all, the trip to Douglas had cost me a fortune in gasoline, and I was beginning to run up parking fees as I maneuvered around Denver.

  Menken had already left for work, but a sulking Cecelia was there, awaiting her ride to school. “Oh. Cecelia,” I said, caught short at finding her still home. “Hi.”

  Cecelia read my awkwardness like it was written in neon.

  “Oh, it’s you, Em. Well. I’ll tell Daddy you called.”

  “Well, ah, actually I need to talk to you, too,” I said, with a wave of guilt. “I’m ah … returning your call,” I lied, wishing I knew even an ounce of guile when it truly mattered.

  “Me?” she said with a bitterness that skewered me to the bone. “Why would anyone want to talk to me?”

  Impatience bloomed into irritation. “Cut it out, Cecelia. I wanted you to know that I agree with you. That Melanie Steen person isn’t anyone I’d want to open up to, either.”

  Cecelia made a noncommittal sound somewhere between a clearing of her throat and a melodramatic grunt.

  “So your dad and I talked and he agreed I should find you someone better. So I am.”

  “Whatever.”

  “No, really, I think it’s a good idea to give it a try with someone else, so I’m sort of screening some candidates for you.”

  “Huh.”

  “So meanwhile, I was wondering … well, there you were in the middle of nowhere with your mother, and this guy Po Bradley-”

  “Oh, that asshole.”

  “Asshole? What did Mr. Bradley do that pissed you off, Cecelia?”

  “Oh, forget it!”

  “No,” I snapped. “This is all about remembering, Cecelia.”

  “I don’t want to,” she spat.

  “Well, I do,” I said, trying to adjust the note of irritation in my voice to one of pleading. “Talk to me, Celie.”

  “Okay. Okay! You want to know? He thinks he’s like God’s gift, you know? Always coming around and seeing if Ma needed something. A real anus.”

  “And did she need anything?”

  Cecelia began to shriek. “Jesus CHRIST! What the hell do you mean?”

  I mentally slapped my own wrist for my insensitivity, took a deep breath, and jumped into the middle of what was really on my mind: “Celie, honey, I know your mother went away for a while and then came back. Remember? It was when we first met …” It was back when you were more like a kid, I thought bitterly. Back when you still listened to me, and came to me with what mattered to you; back before you learned to hold each and every citizen of this earth over the age of twenty-one in absolute contempt.

  Silence.

  My head rushing with guilt over shucking her off for her mother, I said, “Cecelia, I’m trying to piece together what was happening in her life, so I can understand this picture better. So I can help.”

  More silence.

  Rushing onward with the next wave of irritation that hit me, I said, “When she went away, you thought she’d left with a man. You wrote that in a limerick on the refrigerator, remember? And now you’re all upset about Po Bradley. So tell me, Cecelia, was your mother doing things—you know, behaving in a way that made you feel bad about her?”

  More silence, and then, “No. I thought she went away with that man, but it turned out she didn’t.”

  “Wasn’t with him?”

  “No.” It was a whisper.

  “How do you know?”

  With a raw edge of defiance, she blurted, “Because he came to see me while she was gone, that’s why!”

  “Chandler came to see you, Cecelia?”

  The voice that answered that question hissed with anger. “Yes!” A moment later, Cecelia spoke again, this time wobbly and uncertain: “Why?”

  I rummaged wildly through my brain for any question to ask other than the one that crowded my mind, but there it was, unavoidable. “Um, Cecelia, did he—”

  “Oh, right! You think I’d let him touch me?”

  “Well, that wasn’t exactly what I was going to …” I trailed off, because yes, that was exactly what I had been going to ask. And because I didn’t want to admit even to myself just how badly I wanted to know what this guy was really like. Finally, I said, “Well, tell me about him, Cecelia. Was he, ah, nice to you?”

  A pause. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, how did he approach you?”

  Cecelia’s voice shifted into an elaborately vague tone, which I took to mean that she knew she was onto something important and wanted to play it for all it was worth. “Oh, he’d call me up sometimes, just to see how I was.” But then, after a masterfully brief pause, she delivered her coup de grace: “No one else did that.”

  I thought about that one for a while. All I could think to say was, “You’re right, Cecelia, people have left you on your own way too much.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  THE painful tenor of Cecelia’s words still crowded my head as I waited in the offices of Renata DuBois, M.S.W. I had found Chandler disturbing enough as he sauntered through Miriam’s journals—no, let me be honest: disturbingly alluring—but now he had sprung from those pages into the life of an underaged girl. What had he been doing, visiting Cecelia after her mother had left? I could only suppose that he had visited with her alone, without the protection of her father, as what father would allow such a man to pay calls on his daughter?

  Renata DuBois was a dishwater blonde with preoccupied eyes. As she beckoned me into her consulting room and indicated a chair, those eyes inspected the four walls, the floor, the ceiling, and the top of her desk, but never looked directly at me. “Tell me why you are here,” she began, apparently addressing her folded hands.

  I sighed. So much for screening these creatures over the telephone, where such habits as lack of eye contact went undetected. But I jumped on in, figuring that as long as I was there, I might as well give the woman a full screening. “I’ve been authorized to find a therapist for a young friend of mine,” I began, watching her for any reaction that might indicate that, like her predecessor, she thought I was hiding some festering neurosis behind a fantasy friend. Renata remained impassive. So far so good. I uncrossed my panty hose-plastered legs and recrossed them the other way. I was decked out à la corporate interview, as I had Fred Howard to visit next. “She’s a teenager who’s had a terrible trauma and has reacted by blocking the memory of that trauma. I’m a family friend, and I hope to help her by finding someone she might feel comfortable talking to. I mean, clearly her problem is a bit out of my s
cope. I’m a geologist,” I found myself saying. Having followed the social custom of looking away from my audience as I spoke, I looked up at Renata DuBois to gauge her reaction. I found that she was staring intently at me, but the instant she saw my eyes focus on her, she averted her gaze to a spot on the ceiling without tipping back her head or raising her eyebrows. I looked up, startled. There was nothing up there that could have attracted her attention so suddenly, only plain white paint on ordinary drywall texturing.

  “Please continue,” she said.

  “Well, I understand that blocked memory is not uncommon, but I’m wondering if maybe you have some special experience with it.”

  “Please tell me about your friend’s trauma,” she instructed the ceiling.

  I took a deep breath and plunged in. “Well, this is a teenaged girl whose mother had been gone for a while in some sort of rebellion from her marriage. I don’t know the particulars, but the mother came back and then later took the girl with her to a remote ranch a ways north of here for the summer, to get her away from the advances of some boy.” I looked up. Renata DuBois’s dark blue eyes bored into me for a split second longer before twitching toward the ceiling.

  “Um-hum.”

  “Um, and, well, the trauma—” My mind stalled again, rethinking just what Cecelia’s trauma had entailed. “Her trauma was that while on this ranch, her mother was murdered.” I glanced quickly at the psychotherapist, trying to catch her eyes before she looked away. Boing, up to the ceiling again.

  “Murdered?” she said.

  “Yes. Some man murdered her. The local authorities have no leads on the killing, and the daughter, who was presumably fully conscious at the time, can remember nothing from the morning preceding the murder until some days afterward, when her father brought her back to Denver.” Glance. Boing. “So she probably saw it happen. In fact, her mother could be heard, um, dying in the background when the girl phoned for help.”

  By this point, I was staring at Renata DuBois the entire time I was talking, waiting for her to peel her eyes off the ceiling. I was past auditioning her as a possible counselor for Cecelia—there was no way a sulking teenager was going to put up with this kind of optical gymnastics—but for my own part, I wanted to know just how long I could keep this woman staring at the ceiling. Quite a while, as I was to discover.

  After forty or fifty seconds, I couldn’t stand the suspense. “Hey!” I shouted. “Are you with me?”

  “You were saying,” said Renata DuBois.

  “Hey! Every time I look at you, you get your eyes stuck up under your eyebrows. I … I’ll be blunt. I find that very disconcerting.”

  “Oh. I look away so I won’t interfere with your process.”

  “My what?”

  “Process. My gaze is very intense, because I’m concentrating very carefully and fully on every word you say, the tone of your voice, your incidental gestures. So when you look at me, I look away so my attention doesn’t intrude on what you need to do here. Please proceed,” she told the ceiling.

  I leaned forward and rubbed my own eyes. How had I thought this would be a simple task? I said, “I’ve taken too much of your time already,” and began to collect my jacket and keys.

  “As you wish,” said Renata DuBois. “That will be ninety dollars.”

  “Ninety what?”

  “As I explained over the phone, my time is valuable to me. I charge ninety dollars per hour, or any portion thereof. You may write a check if you prefer.”

  I moved from that unfortunate interview on to the one at Boomer Oil, which I presumed would be equally galling.

  Fred Howard was in a meeting when I arrived, and did not make himself available to me at the scheduled time. His secretary smoothly apologized to me, saying that he was being held over in another meeting and would probably receive me ten or fifteen minutes later than expected. That gave me plenty of time to fail at picking anything substantive from her brains, stoke up on free coffee from the coffee room down the hall, and wonder whether I should ask him about the wildcat on Po’s property. If I really wanted a job, it was exactly the wrong sort of thing to talk about. On the other hand, if I wanted a job, I had might better look for one with a company that had better ideas about where to drill wells.

  Half an hour into Fred’s ten-or fifteen-minute delay, I got to reading the company prospectus. “Boomer Oil Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Van der Vliet N.V., Amsterdam,” the glossy pages announced. Well, it was news to me that the Dutchies owned Boomer, but what I didn’t know about any specific corporate entity anywhere up or down Seventeenth Street would fill a great many books. I stared only briefly at the financial sheet (such cold and no doubt elaborately shuffled reckonings of numbers never having been my cup of tea), then thumbed lazily through the stiff, slick pages, which featured photographs geared to impress me that Boomer Oil was truly booming: low-angle photo of big rig thrusting its muscular derrick skyward somewhere in the western United States; white men in hard hats and blue coveralls fondling drill pipe in foreground. White man in white lab coat staring wisely into test tube, clever, mood-inducing lineup of shadows in face and reflections in protective eyewear. White men in clean hard hats and thousand-dollar business suits applauding as one of their brethren puts three-hundred-dollar shoe to the shovel to break ground for new industrial compound. Same white men in suits baring teeth in semblances of friendly grimaces as they shake hands with big black man in regal caftan and pillbox cap.

  Boomer was doing deals overseas? I’d always known it as a purely domestic company, even in the years when everyone who could get a passport was trying to get the hell out of the United States to make a buck. I flipped back to the introductory page again, reread the bit about Dutch ownership. Ah, the Dutch had acquired Boomer in just the past year or so; that explained it. So the hand-shaking pose was indeed Boomer’s virgin (and Dutch-financed) venture overseas, but to where? I flipped back again. Western Africa, an offshore test slated. Black guy in caftan very happy indeed. More gold crowns for that guy’s teeth.

  I’d heard about such tests: millions of dollars to get in and get out, leaving the test hole plugged because hey, it was only a test. I didn’t understand such activities, but such was apparently the wisdom of doing business with “emerging” nations.

  I turned my head toward the efficient-looking woman who sat between me and Fred Howard’s office. As I opened my mouth to speak, she neither looked up nor skipped a beat with her typing, but stated smoothly, “I’m certain Mr. Howard will be with you any time now.”

  I smiled, happy to be thus informed that being kept waiting for forty-five minutes in this office was such a routine occurrence that this woman had perfected the art of mollification. “How do you like working for the Dutch?” I asked her.

  “Oh, it’s no difference that I can tell,” she said. “Well, there’s the odd fax or phone call overseas, but aside from learning how to dial internationally, it’s been no trouble at all.”

  I pondered this summation of the difference between isolationism and emergence into the multinational economy. “But it looks like you’re getting some different projects. Like this one in Africa.”

  “Oh, that. I don’t handle the business with the travel agent; Lily down the hall does that.”

  “How about this chemical concern?”

  “Hmm?”

  “There’s a picture of a man here with a test tube.”

  “Oh. Mmm. You mean the plant in Colombia.”

  “South America?” I looked back at the prospectus. La Plata Mineral and Chemical, Bogotá, Colombia, a subsidiary of Boomer Oil. “Has Boomer owned it long?” I asked, wondering what the connection might be.

  “Oh, just a year or two.” -

  “Oh. Does Mr. Howard travel overseas much?”

  The woman leaned her well-tailored self forward and put her finger on the screen of her computer. “Ohhh. Um,” she murmured pointedly, narrowing her eyes to an attack on the mysteries of binary civilization.


  “Where does Mr. Howard go when he goes? Has he been to Africa?”

  “Will you excuse me?” she intoned. “I have to get this out before lunch.”

  “Sure.” Five minutes later, the door to Fred Howard’s office finally swung open and two men shuffled out. One of them was Fred Howard. The tall, paunchy man with him was saying, “So get yourself up to Saratoga this weekend, Fred. And leave Cindey at home this time, eh?” He clapped Fred on the shoulder and laughed, his own unique mixture of phlegm and bass rumble, with subtle overtones of squeaking hinge.

  Fred wrinkled up his piggy nose and snorted, swatting the bigger man with one of his stiff, piggy-thick hands, then used the appendage to guide him toward the elevator bank.

  When the tall man was safely packed away behind closed elevator doors, Fred turned around, and only then noticed me. His eyes grew wider briefly, then collapsed back to their usual tininess. He stared at me blankly for a moment and then hurried back into his office.

  The phone on his secretary’s desk buzzed. She picked it up, said, “Yes, Mr. Howard? Oh, mm-hmm,” put it down, stood up, and said to me, “Mr. Howard will be just a few minutes more. Why don’t you come with me a moment? I’ll show you around.”

  I climbed to my feet and followed her. When we were about ninety seconds into the tour, just out of sight of Fred Howard’s office, I began to lag behind, and when she turned a corner, I gave her the slip and hurried back down the hall toward the waiting area.

  I was just in time to see -Fred Howard leading a third man out of his office. This man he did not put on an elevator. This man he showed to the stairs. That struck me as mighty odd, as we were six stories up. I ducked into the coffee room and peered around the doorjamb at them.

  As Fred pushed open the fire door that led to the staircase, the third man lingered for a moment, digging through his jacket pockets. He was not a young man. The ravages of perhaps sixty years of hard living had stiffened his shoulders and hands, and only threads of his once-black hair still clung to his oily scalp. His hands shook ever so slightly as he produced a fine silver case, selected a cigarette, and maneuvered it to his lips. As he stepped toward the fire door, he bent forward and lit the cigarette, cuddling the lighter as if he were in a high wind, closing his eyes in satisfaction. As he bent, he turned slightly, instinctively checking what was behind him, and I saw more of his face. His sallow, sunken cheeks writhed between the flaring nares of his arching nose as he drew in the ritual relief of the first drag. He looked straight at me, with eyes as sharp as needles.