“A sophisticated older man. They’re the best kind. I’ll bet he’s nice. Is he nice?”
Dolores thought about the last time she saw him. She remembered the restraining orders and the policeman who’d yanked her arms behind her back and bent her over the hood of the squad car. “I dunno. Not nice exactly.”
“Men, huh?” Her frown looked a lot like Dr. Bradford’s. “Well, he should be here to meet you. That’s for sure.” She rummaged in her purse and produced a cell phone. “Why don’t we call him and tell him to get on over here.” The long pink nails hovered over the keypad like butterflies waiting to land. “What’s the number?”
“I ... I don’t know the number. It’s probably unlisted.” Dolores could feel her breathing getting fast again. She wanted to hum but thought she’d better not. “Anyway, he’s probably just busy.” She wanted to tell Jennifer about Bryce’s act at the Three Crowns and that he couldn’t just drop everything at a moment’s notice but she was afraid, afraid she’d get that look on her face like Dr. Bradford’s. She was afraid Jennifer would talk about obsessions and stalking and all those things people said when they didn’t understand about Bryce and her.
But Jennifer wasn’t even looking at her. She seemed to be looking at something inside her own head and her eyes had gone all glittery, like Leonard’s did when he had his scary thoughts. “Men need to be taken down a peg, don’t you agree? Think they can walk all over us.” Her laugh was a little bit like Leonard’s, too. “My own so-called boyfriend tells me the other day he’s going to marry someone else. Didn’t want me to see it first on TV, can you believe it?” The pink fingernails were drumming the table so hard the tip of the middle one snapped off, but Jennifer didn’t seem to notice. “I’ve been his secretary, his lover, even his laundress.” She made a disgusted snort. “I’ve answered thousands of letters from his retarded fans. And now he tells me he’s knocked up some blond bimbo and he’s going to marry her. Can you believe it?”
“Um . . .” Dolores wanted to tell her about the fingernail but Jennifer suddenly sniffed and then giggled again. “Well, enough about me. I’m just a teensy bit angry.” She crumbled a corner off her muffin, popped it into her mouth, and bit down hard on it. Suddenly her eyes widened and she grabbed her jaw. “Oh shit.” She fished around inside her mouth with the thumb and forefinger of her left hand, withdrawing something white.
Dolores was alarmed. It looked like a tooth. She’d had enough teeth yanked out of her head to know how painful it was, but when she looked at Jennifer’s face the woman seemed more furious than wounded. She sucked the thing once and then dropped it into the ashtray and got to her feet. Dolores stared at it.
“Is that your tooth?”
“That piece of shit is a temporary crown. I’m not getting the real thing installed until tomorrow.” She rolled her tongue around inside her mouth and then turned away. “I’m going to the washroom in rinse out my mouth.”
Dolores stared at the thing, tipping it this way and that in the ashtray, amazed at the contours, trying to imagine where it had come from and if this one was temporary what the real crown would look like.
Jennifer reappeared and gathered up her parcels from the bench. The muffin lay abandoned on the table. “Okay. I think we need to take you to your boyfriend’s place.”
“Um. That’s okay. I’ll wait here awhile.”
“He’s never going to come.” The giggle and the scrunched-up smile had vanished but the eyes were still glittering. “You need to have it out with him, Doris. Once and for all.” She grabbed her parcels and the duffle bag and headed for the door. Dolores sat for a moment, humming softly, and when she looked over and saw the woman and her bag disappearing out the door she scooped the temporary crown into a napkin and shoved it in her pants pocket. The tip of the pink nail was harder to find. It had slipped under the pile of napkins holding the scarcely touched muffin. Dolores gathered the whole thing together and put it in the pocket of her shirt.
She pushed through to the heat and confusion of the street and found Jennifer standing beside a black convertible, holding the passenger door open. Dolores sank with difficulty into the seat and then had to pull her swollen legs in after her.
She peered at the console once they were moving. “What is this thing?”
“You’re kidding, right?” Jennifer frowned at her. “You’ve never seen a Jaguar before?”
“Um . . .” Dolores found she could hum under her breath and the sound of the motor masked it.
Within minutes they were pulling up to the shipping entrance to Three Crowns. The woman reached across Dolores’s stomach and pushed the passenger door open. “Out you get. I’ll go and park this thing and then I’ll get the key for you from the front desk.” She checked over her shoulder watching for an opportunity to pull out, but then she appeared to change her mind and reached across again, this time to open the glove compartment. Dolores was stunned. Inside was the biggest pile of quarters she’d ever seen. Jennifer scooped up two handfuls and thrust them into her lap.
“You can play the slot machines while you wait.” She gave Dolores a little shove. “Off you go. But stay in the lobby, okay? That way I can find you again.”
Dolores stumbled out of the car, shoving coins into her pants pockets. Several quarters dropped to the sidewalk and she had to stoop down to retrieve them. When she looked up again the car and the woman and all Dolores’s possessions had disappeared.
She stood still for a full minute, trying to make sense of what had happened, feeling the pockets of her yellow knit pants stretch under the weight of the coins. She wanted to sag against the wall and close her eyes but she hadn’t liked that glittery look in Jennifer’s eyes so she pulled herself together and shuffled around to the front entrance of the hotel.
She gasped. A big poster advertising Bryce’s show took up most of the front of the building. He seemed to be looking right into her eyes and she ran her fingers through her hair trying to tidy it. She didn’t want him to see her looking like she’d just stepped off the bus. There were little trees in cement boxes lining the drive and she stood behind one for a moment watching the doorman in his red and black uniform. A limousine pulled up to the curved driveway and the man tugged at his tunic and ran over to open the driver’s door. Dolores could hardly believe it. Jonathan Finn from Las Vegas Nights stepped from the car and handed the doorman the keys. He took the stairs to the entrance two at a time and just before he pushed through he turned and smiled at Dolores. She thought she saw his lips move, saying, “I love you, Dolores.” She had to hang onto one of the little trees for a minute and take a deep breath. What would Leonard say about this? It was his favorite TV show. She waited another minute until the doorman got into the limousine and began to drive it off, and then she sidled through the revolving doors and into the lobby of the Three Crowns. Jonathan Finn was nowhere in sight, but she knew what she’d seen. He loved her. She hummed to herself, hugging this new knowledge to her heart.
She wanted to stop and stare at the colors in the carpet and the impossibly soft sofas and chairs but she knew from last year that if the management noticed her they’d ask her to leave. She spotted hanks and banks of slot machines lining the walls and found an unoccupied one tucked away behind a huge potted plant. She watched a man put his quarters into the machine next to hers and listened to the jangly sounds. She was astounded. They sounded a lot like the notes she hummed when she tried to get calm.
Dolores had no idea how long she’d been standing there sometimes shoving quarters into the machine and sometimes staring at the flashing lights. Once she was surprised by a shower of coins but was afraid of the noise the machine made when she won, fearing people would be drawn to it and ask her what she thought she was doing in such a fancy place. Hunger pangs and worry about Jennifer and her duffle bag made her eat the muffin in her pocket and now she was hungry again.
Suddenly Jennifer was there, standing beside her, just as she had been in the doughnut shop. Only this ti
me she was wearing a scarf, dark glasses, and black leather gloves, and she was holding out a plastic card with a strip on one side.
“Here’s the key to your boyfriend’s suite.” She pushed her sunglasses onto her head for a moment and her eyes were glittering even more than Leonard’s when he was about to do something crazy. “I think you’d better get right up there. Tell him how you feel about things.”
Dolores took the card and ran her finger over the surface. It wouldn’t fit in the little paper cups but she’d keep it anyway. “My bag…?”
“It’s still in the car. I’ll go and get it while you’re going to the room.”
“Where do I go?” Dolores was confused about so many things; all she really wanted to do was lean against the wall and close her eyes.
“He’s on the top floor where the big suites are. The elevators are over here.” She put the sunglasses on and took Dolores’s elbow, pushing her across the thick carpet, past the gorgeous sofas and into a marble foyer with elevators along both walls. “It’s straight ahead when you get out of the elevator.” She seemed to remember something. “You know how to use this key?”
Dolores stared at the floor.
“Okay, you shove it into the slot above the handle with the strip away from you. Bring it out again and when the little light turns green, you can open the door.”
“But my bag? Where’d you say my bag was?”
“I’ll be waiting right here with your bag.” Jennifer was talking very softly now, almost whispering. “When you’ve told him . . . well, whatever you want to tell him, come back here and I’ll give you your bag.” She pushed something with her gloved finger and the elevator door slid open.
Dolores hesitated but Jennifer pushed her in and reached behind her to push a button inside the elevator.
When the elevator stopped, Dolores peered out, making sure there was no one in the hall. She held the card that Jennifer had called a key but the door across from the elevator was already ajar. She pushed it farther open and stuck her head in, humming the two notes as loud as she could. When no one stopped her she stepped into a light green vestibule with a huge painting of cactus and desert sand on the right wall. She hesitated and then called out softly, “Bryce?” She wished she’d rehearsed what she’d say to him but there was no answer. She walked into a living room, with another of the scrumptious sofas on a pale beige carpet. Two glasses half full of some kind of liquid and melting ice cubes sat on the coffee table. She glanced at the kitchen but it was empty. There was another half-open door leading off the living room. She walked over and pushed it fully open.
At first she thought they were sleeping, Bryce on his back, his naked torso partly covered by a sheet and the girl with her long blond hair spread out on the pillowcase. But then she saw the blood and the hole in Bryce’s forehead where no one should have a hole. And when she leaned over to get a better look, she noticed the girl’s hair was covering a section of her cheek that was red and pulpy and leaking blood.
A gun lay on the pillow. She thought for a second about picking it up, but it was much too big for her treasure collection so she left it where it was. She felt sad about Bryce and about the pretty girl too. But she knew in her heart that what Dr. Bradford had said was true. She and Bryce weren’t really engaged. It was just a kind of dream of hers.
She heard a siren and then another and when she looked out the window she saw several police cars pulling up to the hotel’s entrance. The doorman was tugging on his tunic and flapping his arms around.
Dolores decided to take the stairs down. She could stop at each floor and see if there was any sign of Jonathan Finn. He might be wondering where she’d got to and she didn’t like to keep him waiting.
Before she left she looked again at the couple on the bed. She’d like to leave a gift for them, some sort of memorial like people left her when her grandmother died, but all of her treasures were in Jennifer’s car. Then she remembered the temporary crown in its little bed of napkins in her pants pocket. She pulled it out and dropped it near Bryce’s hand. She noticed the little pink fingernail was caught in the folds, but it looked so pretty against the white sheet she decided to leave that as well.
<
~ * ~
EMILY RABOTEAU
Smile
from The Gettysburg Review
“Row!” his père commands but Tee Paul’s arms are jelly. His père’s back at the prow of the pirogue is a trunk of muscle. “Row you peeshwank capon, row! “ Between them on the peeling pirogue floor lies Bowleg’s boy, Smile, with a broken head. “Row!” His père’s oar slides into the brack like a knife, deeper and darker down bayou they go, until the shore lights extinguish, until even the shadows have shadows. His throat is a knot. The bullfrogs croak, “Oh no, oh no.”
Tee Paul can’t work his oar for looking into his podna’s licorice face in the lantern light. Smile’s blood is mixing with the half-inch pool of swamp water down there. Smile’s eyes are two dead coins with a hold on him.
“Row!” Instead of sailing straight, the boat wig-wags like a lizard tail through the silent, bearded cypress. And slowly because only his père is doing the work. “Row!”
“Can’t, Pop,” Tee Paul says. He’s got those jelly arms. He hasn’t the strength to slap at a mosquito.
“What?” his père spits, spinning around. He’s got the whiskey smell and the mad dog look.
“I got the mal au coeur!” he says and vomits a slop as thick as the Atchafalaya itself over the side of his père’s pirogue.
Tawk! His père reaches his oar across and cracks him one good on the head, same way he did Smile with the doorstop rock for stealing his alligator money. Tee Paul’s afraid now. The shock freezes him. The fear moves him. Father and son cut the swamp like lard.
A smell rises. Smile must’ve shit his pants in a death spasm. “Pooyeye,” says Tee Paul’s père. When the flies come he ropes Smile’s middle to the anchor and dumps him by the roots of a strangler tree. The swamp swallows Smile up fast, bottom first, head last. The old man tips a bit and says, “Listen, couyon. He was a no-good burglar nigger, him. Dass all. Not of we and us.”
On the long way back, he’s thinking how the tooloulou must be fiddling over Smile’s face already, pinching out his eyes. Or maybe a gator would get him.
Back in their shack on stilts, Hermogine, in her stovepipe hat, squats, skinning a beaver from one of the traps. All Tee Paul meant was to save enough to steal her from harm, to stow away with her on a big river barge. He could have carried her off on his back. She’s a little wisp of a thing, sickly. Her nightgown is so thin. There’s a blue vein beating in her forehead.
“Why you wake, bebette?” their père grumbles, freeing his bunions from his boots. “Fais do-do.” She asks do they want coffee, but the old man’s already reaching for the other stuff.
Tuesday is her birthday. They wrap her in a quilt, set her in the buggy, and ride her to town to pick out a gift.
Do she want dat doll? Do she want a yard of dat yellow gingham to make a apron? Do she want dis pop-up picture book from France? No, she want de pair of chartreuse lovebirds in dat cage over de crawdaddy barrel. Can she have dem birds? Weh, she can.
The old man pays with a cut of his rescued money. Tee Paul had stole it one nickel at a time. All winter long he stashed the money in his podna’s tackle box, where his père was never meant to look. Smile kept count for him. They’d lay down their fishing poles in the muck to look at all the coins collecting in there. “Soon,” Smile would smile then draw his harmonica out from the bib of his overalls. “Mais, I’m gon miss ya podna.” When there was enough Tee Paul would run away. He would carry his little sister up the Bayou on his back. He would save her.
The coins clink on the counter now like chains. Hermogine’s kissing at the birds through the bars. Un p’tit bee. Their wings are clipped. Their beaks are coming off. They have reptilian eyes. They are not cheap.
“Don say I never did nothing nice, Gine-Gine
,” their père says, not looking at her, but at Tee Paul. The old man’s eyes are possum pink.
“Look!” says Hermogine out on the groaning porch of the dry goods store. The sun is too bright. “Dass Mister Bowleg, de zydeco man! Where his accordion at?”
Bowleg’s in the street, dragging his potbelly mule. “Hey-o!” he calls. “Ya’all seen my boug?”
Tee Paul looks at the rusty cage in his sister’s arms. His finger twitches, but he knows if he unlatches the cage door to let them go, those birds won’t fly away. They’ll just drop like turds to the floorboards. He licks his dry lips, and his père grips his shoulder, hard.
“Ya seen my boug, Smile?”
<
~ * ~
R. T. SMITH
Ina Grove
From The Virginia Quarterly Review
The Rockbridge County Gazette, June 28, 1904
PAINTER, THE IRISH CREEK DESPERADO, ARRAIGNED
by Reese Prescott
The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 Page 36
