Fifty Mice

by Daniel Pyne

  It doesn’t worry him, though. This is a reconnaissance.

  The road zags and hairpins, and for a moment he thinks he’s going to wind up where he started, but by stubbornly taking a left at every intersection, and aiming uphill, Jay finally breaks out of the jumble of hillside bungalows onto Old Stage Road, passes through a grove of disheveled eucalyptus, and crests a rise that spits him onto a plateau tangled with scrub oak, manzanita, and wildflowers; the empty windswept wilds of Catalina are sprawled before him, quaint Avalon tumbles down into the sea behind him. A furl of ashen fog breaks over the Pacific-side hills like floodwater, sending ghostly fingers down the arroyos, weird, because the sun above the marine inversion is so bright, the sky so blue. Jay takes his foot off the accelerator and the golf cart coasts. Serpentine blacktop transitions to asphalt slurry and disappears into the incoming fog, but Jay glides forward into it, sunlight refracted by the brume into blinding scattershot dreamstuff. Jay feels the cool glaze of moisture on his face and hands, his shirt goes damply limp, he loses all sense of direction. Visibility drops to maybe two feet, and he stays on the road only by extrapolating its direction from the edges he can see on either side of his cart.

  It’s a metaphor for his present situation and his state of mind: nowhere, directionless, blind.

  But for the moment he’s free.

  There was heavy fog the night Jay’s family came apart. A heavy, lightless, mourning fog; he had to run through it, to get to the warm blush of the neighbor’s house, on the higher ground; run through the black vertical insults of leafless cottonwood on the steeply sloping hillside, run barefoot on the frost-flattened grass and leaves, blind with fear and tears and horror.

  The angry cold of that night was like a series of thick curtains piling up as he ran through them. Swirling smoke from a fireplace upwind. The crazy jack-o’-lantern windows of the Bruces’ house. So much that he can’t, won’t, shouldn’t, doesn’t want to remember, as he runs, ran, eight years, two months, six days old, uphill, feet slipping on rotted leaves, running, ran, forward to the light, thinking then only about the light and the futureless safety it promised to a little boy with nothing left behind him but a void.

  Jay jams on his brakes. The cart slides, drifts. A huge dark shape looms directly in front of him. And another. And another. Floating in with the fog. He can hear a heavy rasp of a kind of primordial breathing, smells the buffalo before they resolve from the mist, tragic eyes, grim muzzles, fur glistening with droplets of water that drip drip drip as they shuffle past him, snuffling and unimpressed. There are at least twenty shaggy black-brown creatures, maybe more beyond the white veil of the fog. He waits for them to pass, then realizes they’re not passing, they’ve slowed, stopped, several bulls blocking his forward progress on the road.

  The fog eases unexpectedly: blue sky, sun, Jay shades his eyes, looks back the way he came. Now Avalon is gone, carpeted by the graywhite cloud, but he can back through the motionless herd; switches the lever on the cart and it bleats an irritating meeeeeeeeeeeeeeep that causes the buffalo to grunt and shift and he weaves reversing through them, tires slipping on the soft gravel that shoulder the road, finally finding traction on the blacktop where he’s swallowed again by the mist.

  Jay stops here to get his bearings. The wind picks up and the fog dissipates again for fifty yards in every direction and the bleary sun settles into the rimy southwestern sky and bleeds away, and the buffalo are gone.

  Somewhere a prop plane engine whines as it hurries away from the island.

  From his vantage point on this plateau, Jay can look east to the mainland, the curve of Long Beach and San Pedro and Portuguese Bend; Palos Verdes lumps darkish up out of the grayblue wind-chopped sea but melts into the grayblue blur of city that, save the sprinkling of early lights, melts into the grayblue eastern sky as if there are no borders between heaven and earth, now or then. Jay tries to remember what the city looks like when it’s clear. He can’t. He’s not surprised by this.

  More shrill beeping as he turns the cart around, slots the lever back to forward, and begins his retreat back into an Avalon now nested deep in the Pacific winter’s four-o’clock shadow.

  | 8 |

  GINGER’S VOICE, SWEET, DISTANT, SINGS:

  Pack up all my care and woe—

  —here I go

  singing low.

  Bye, bye, blackbird.

  Jay is stretched out on the lumpen tweed sofa, with a leopard-print Snuggie as a comforter; he stares into the darkness and listens:

  Where somebody waits for me

  sugar’s sweet

  so is she

  bye, bye, blackbird.

  She sings every night. The mental picture Jay has of Helen and Ginger in the high poster bed is borne of the glimpse he got into the bedroom as he shuffled down the hallway from the bathroom to his sofa: Helen clutching a well-worn, plush white stuffed mouse, curled small against the pillows, Ginger in an oversize blood-red Cal State Northridge T-shirt with socks still on her feet. Her face slick with tears.

  No one here can love or understand me.

  Her voice falters.

  Oh what hard luck . . . stories . . .

  She stops. The house is quiet for a while. Jay can hear his pulse in his ears, steady. Then, so softly her voice is a mere tracing on the darkness:

  . . . light the light

  I’ll arrive . . . late tonight . . .

  Helen must be asleep. Jay pictures Ginger, motionless, afraid that if she moves she might wake the girl up. Her gaze is like nothing he’s ever seen in a woman, what he and Vaughn call quarterback eyes—in the zone: dead calm, scary focused, stripped of emotion despite the frequent unexplained spill of tears. Calculating and distant and confident and cold.

  Is she crying now? Is she watching the up and down of her daughter’s breathing? Does she ever worry it will stop?

  What does she not want to remember?

  The light cast into the hallway from the bedroom snaps off.

  The hush of night. Crickets. Distant roll of the ocean surf on the stoney beach.

  • • •

  Then, a child’s screaming.

  He’s dreaming. His sister.

  Cara?

  No.

  The lamplight behind the sofa flicks on, and Jay, squinting painfully, wonders how long he’s been asleep, or if he’s been asleep at all. A child’s screaming, not a dream. He stares stupidly at the luminous face of his watch, coiled on the coffee table. Little hand on the two. The screams are coming from the bedroom, staccato, hysterical. Jay gets up, his leg still asleep, and thumps down the hallway to the bedroom doorway, past which he can make out, in the ambient light from behind him, Helen, thrashing, screaming, still asleep but eyes wide open, mouth gaping, wild with a discarnate hysteria, and Ginger freaking out, trying to hold her and calm her with words:

  “Babygirl, it’s okay, what’s wrong, I’m here, it’s okay, shhh, okay, I’m here, come on, it’s—”

  Jay in the doorway, awkward, tentative, says something barely articulate that he means to be a question.

  “Night terrors,” Ginger says.

  Helen struggles and kicks: “No no no no—”

  Jay’s head buzzes, anxious; he hasn’t felt this useless in a long time.

  “Can you—” Ginger asks, her arms struggling to contain all Helen’s bad dreams, “can—”

  “—What?”

  “—hold her—just—while I—” Ginger looks up at him plaintively. Jay inadvertently takes a worried step back.

  “You know, um, look, I’m not . . . really—”

  Ginger barks. “I’m not asking you to fucking adopt her—”

  “—kids aren’t my—” Cara had nightmares.

  “—I just need some goddamn help for five fucking seconds so I can get a cold washcloth and—”

  • • •

 
Helen shouts, kicks Ginger hard in the face, breaks away from her mother and darts for the doorway. And Jay is in it. He has no choice but to catch her up in his arms, grabs her, awkwardly, pulls her against his chest and holds her and she screams and her legs flail and her tiny hands slap against his shoulders with a torpid, halfhearted fury, and he’s never felt anything like it before, all that life in his arms.

  “Okay,” Jay says, astonished, worried, “I got her. Here. Here—”

  But Ginger powers past, veers around him, out of the bedroom and into the bathroom directly across the hallway.

  “I got her,” Jay promises, although he’s not completely sure.

  “It’s okay, honey, Helen”—Ginger calls back out at them, high-pitched, stressed, but as if sweetly—“it’s okay, it’s okay—”

  Water running. Splashing in the basin. The rattle of a towel rack, the snap of fabric.

  Helen screams.

  Jay’s starting to lose his grip on her. “Um—”

  A soft pink random kicking heel finally catches Jay in the groin and sinks him with a dull moan. But he holds on to the delirious little girl. It’s a test, he tells himself. He’s not going to fail it. And then Ginger is back with a cold, dripping washcloth that she gently draws across both sides of Helen’s face, and water runs down his arms, and he feels the static charge of Ginger next to him, impassioned, intense, and the little girl mumbles and squirms and winds down. Looming over them both, fragrant with perfume and soap, Ginger’s bare skin is cool when it brushes his, her eyes all in shadow, her cheek fiery where Helen smacked her. She helps Jay find his feet, and guides him, still holding on tightly to the little girl, back to the bed, where he eases Helen down in the soft rat’s nest of bedclothing and Ginger presses the washcloth to her forehead.

  “It’s a dream, Helen,” she says softly. “Just a bad bad dream, babygirl, it’s okay,” and then, like a mantra: “Mommy’s here Mommy’s here Mommy’s here . . .”

  Helen uncoils, limp. Still sleeping.

  Ginger: “. . . shhhhhhhhhhh.”

  Jay steps off, retreats to the doorway, looks once back over his shoulder, and leaves them alone.

  • • •

  Ginger finds him in the kitchen, hunched over the tiny breakfast table, steam from an Herbalife promotional coffee mug swirling like tiny ghosts, and two tea bags leaking puddles onto the Formica.

  “Thank you.”

  Jay looks up at her as if he’s seeing her for the first time: bare legs, wrinkled T-shirt, the gentle, awkward slope of her breasts, the nasty swelling on her face and ragged-weary cast of those eyes. Her fingers twist together with a kind of contrition.

  “Look. I’m sorry, I . . . You know. What I said,” she adds.

  Jay nods, noncommittal. “I made you some tea.”

  “Thanks.”

  But she doesn’t come into the kitchen, and Jay doesn’t make any move to hand her the other mug.

  They allow the quiet that ensues. In the half a week they’ve been together, there’s been a lot of quiet, they’ve rarely talked, and Helen’s strange, fierce silence hasn’t required any pretense of token conversation.

  “She’s not usually—”

  Jay says it’s okay and they lapse into a second silence. He thinks about what Public told him was her crime—accessory to murder—and tries to reconcile it with the woman he’s been living with for the past three days. He’s not afraid of her. Should he be?

  “There are buffalo here.”

  Ginger nods. “From the movies. I read about it in a guidebook,” she says, “or supposedly. They brought fourteen here for a film shoot, and, typical, never bothered to take them back. Too expensive. Beefalo, actually. Part cow. Once there were as many as six hundred, but—” She fusses with her hair, abruptly self-conscious. Evidently she’s said way more than she intended, but wraps it up, anyway, subdued: “They had to put them on birth control.”

  “What is going on, Ginger? Can you tell me what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know if I understand what you mean.”

  “All this,” Jay says.

  She’s frowning. “Okay.”

  “This is weird. What we’re doing.”

  “Witness program?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Weird.” Ginger hesitates, as if she suspects it’s a trick question. “Yes it is.” Careful: “But, seriously, what about the witness protection program is a surprise? You gotta sign about a million documents to get a new life.”

  “What if I don’t want a new life?”

  “Your old one was that good?”

  This stops Jay short. He shakes his head, stares at the reflection of light in his tea mug. “I never thought it would be subject to comparison,” Jay says. “It was what it was.”

  “Yeah, that was cheap. I’m sorry,” Ginger says, sad suddenly, then offers, gently, “Thanks for helping me with Helen. You’ve got a knack with kids.”

  Jay looks up at her. “No, I don’t.”

  Ginger nods. “Maybe not.” She takes a moment to try and find another compliment, can’t, so resorts to a hopeful: “But.” Then a sadder: “Well.”

  “What was your old life like?” Jay asks her.

  Ginger doesn’t have to think about it. “Hard,” she says quickly, and with an inflection that tells him she doesn’t want to be asked a follow-up.

  But Jay can’t stop himself: “Public says you helped kill somebody.” If it’s outrage he wants to hear from her, he doesn’t get it.

  She looks incredibly sad, then her eyes flash something savage that she veils quickly, countering curtly with, “Public says your name is James,” in a way that makes it clear she knows it’s not.

  Point taken.

  A third lapse of silence. It swells, fills the house, overcomes them. “So.” A soft exhale of breath and Ginger steps back from the doorway, slipping into darkness.

  Jay calls after her, “I’m here by mistake.”

  No response.

  Her footsteps, the rustling of blankets, the sigh of the mattress.

  Jay gets up and turns out the light, but returns to the table and stays in the kitchen for quite a while longer, to finish his tea.

  | 9 |

  IT’S AN UNGAINLY, mid-sixties, skillion-roofed building. Tan and white.

  Who was Zane Grey?

  The entrance is propped open with a brick.

  A cool, unlit hallway, redolent with discouragement.

  A stairwell with a stack of small square windows framing postcard views of the Avalon hills.

  After a long morning of tepid coffee from Big E’s Café, no customers, and several failed attempts to access the Internet in any useful way on the Island Video desktop computer (he can browse, but he can’t post; can’t access his e-mail; can’t find his Facebook page), Jay took his two-o’clock lunch as instructed, turned the BE BACK AT sign to face the street, killed the lights, and came through the translucent door into a muggy marine midday, locking up behind him.

  The Zane Grey was at the dead end of a walkway street, no sign of its other occupants as he walked in, but he could hear faint strains of an opera, hissing low on cheap speakers somewhere on the first floor.

  Upstairs is no different, a low, cottage-cheese ceiling and a series of closed doors along a zigzag corridor, at the end of which number 204 is ajar, wan daylight streaming through the gap between door and doorjamb, and angled across the thread-worn, piquant corridor carpet.

  Jay enters the office, cagey. Given Public’s track record so far, nothing would surprise Jay, but he’s anxious anyway. Takes in the modest desk, bookshelves crammed with psychology and counseling textbooks, a few fuzzy toys spilling off the lowest shelf, two comfortable club chairs with a hook rug between them. Diplomas tastefully tucked in among generic seascape paintings.

  “Sit. Get comfortable.” />
  Jay whirls. A small, wide, round man with a bad hairpiece comes in from the hallway, leaning heavily on a walker, hands dripping wet, a lit cigarette dangling from his chapped red lips. Sheepish: “No towels in the toilet again.” He straightens, shakes his big hands out, finally wipes them on his linen pants, re-grips the walker and rolls through favoring one hip to settle heavily in the chair by the window. Backlit by this day’s bright gray fog gloom, his face darkens, softens, features suddenly made wooly with shadows.

  Smoke curls around him.

  “I haven’t witnessed anything,” Jay says.

  “Ho! Forget the pleasantries, right to the point. Good.” The man shifts the cigarette from one hand to the other so he can adjust himself in the chair. “My name is Magonis. I’ll be your headshrinker for the foreseeable future.”

  “Are you a doctor?”

  Magonis says he is.

  “Psychologist? Or a medical doctor?”

  Magonis lets this go, because either it should be obvious that he is or he doesn’t care that he isn’t. And all of a sudden, emotions roil up from where Jay has held them in check, he’s dizzy, his head pounds from caffeine and frustration, he worries that he might just explode.

  “Mr. Warren—”

  “—Johnson,” Jay corrects him brusquely, letting his bridled thoughts spill out, “and can I just say that, for the record, changing my name, cutting my hair, without asking my permission, while it may be legal and everything, it doesn’t much make me want to cooperate with you, or Public, or Jane Doe, or whoever. It’s lame. It’s actually stupid, because now I don’t trust you—and you change my name—and you give me a fake family, and you think—what? That’s going to make me feel more comfortable spilling my guts?”

  Magonis just listens, and smokes.

  “Did you do any background on me at all? I mean, Jesus Christ, this is some kind of crazy mistake, anybody who spent half a second on due diligence would realize I am not of any value to anyone, not even my fiancée, really, since I can’t even commit to her,” but now Jay’s lost his way: “I’m tired, I’m confused, nobody will tell me what this is supposed to be about, just a lot of cryptic double-talk and knowing winks and fuck me sideways if you don’t have the wrong guy.”