Fifty Mice

by Daniel Pyne

  His mouth is dry, he can feel his pulse in his head. He’s spent so long being well defended, immune to loss.

  They decide to walk back along Pebbly Beach Road. Everything is gauzy, as though there’s been a slow-smoldering fire inland, but it’s only the midday brume, hilltops ablur, sky scrimmed slate. Helen takes the concrete stairs down to the shore and throws stones in the ocean, while Jay and Ginger find a place among the jagged rocks to sit, already in the blue shadows of the naked cliffs, and watch her.

  “What are you doing?” Ginger asks finally, faintly.

  For the moment, Jay stays silent. It seems like Ginger knows what he’s doing, she just doesn’t want to ask why.

  “What happened in L.A.?”

  “Pretty much my whole life,” he says, tentatively, answering a different question, “I’ve never really wanted anything. I’ve never really had the courage to care about anything. You think you float? I invented floating.”

  Ginger looks unconvinced. “Huh.”

  “I did what you said. I ran. But that was the plan, right? Did they tell you to say it to me, or—”

  “I meant run and keep running. If you’d kept going, what they wanted, or expected, wouldn’t have—”

  Jay cuts her off, “And I saw what I didn’t have. And now my friend is missing, and a girl is dead, and I’m still clueless what these guys want from me, but I decided what I want. I decided.”

  “You don’t know me,” she says. “You don’t know anything about me.” Up on the road, not so discreet, a stationary golf cart holds Barry and Sandy, who aren’t talking. Ginger tries to keep her voice low: “What we had was not a relationship, it was not a family, it was, I don’t know, what, an accident, a kind of theater.”

  “I don’t care. It’s what I want. Can you understand that?”

  Ginger watches Helen dance along the water’s edge. “I can,” she says softly.

  “I don’t care what the world is, as long as you’re in it.”

  He can see how this rocks her; in truth, it rocks him, putting the words one after another and saying it. Ginger slits her eyes and lifts her chin, almost defiant, and runs one hand through her hair to get it out of the way: “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I am way past the idea of things making sense,” Jay says. “Nothing makes sense. Emotions are all that’s left.” He hesitates, then continues. “So, I figure, hell, let them anchor us.”

  He hunts for Ginger’s eyes under the curtain of her bangs. “Let emotions rule.”

  Helen tosses a huge boulder into the sea, so big that she has to use two hands and almost goes into the water with it, and the splash comes flopping back on her. She screams, happy, and glances back at them. There’s nothing coy in her look. Ginger smiles, brittle.

  “I’m a marshal, Jay. I’m a Fed. Deputy U.S. Marshal Virginia Blake. I’m part of the team that put you here. And kept you here.”

  “The inside guy.”

  “Yeah. Put there just in case you want to, you know . . . confide to me what you won’t tell . . . the others.”

  Now it’s Jay’s turn to be rocked by her words.

  As she says them, as he reacts to them, thoughts rear-ending each other as he tries to re-calculate everything he knows, and expects, ruefully blinking back astonishment he chides himself for feeling because, waiting for Ginger and Helen to return to him, Jay had run through all the variations on the Ginger theme, and Ginger the Fed was one of them, sure, but he’d dismissed it as way too pat and paranoid. It certainly helps explain why she told him to run (or he hopes it does), but it isn’t the version of the story he was yearning for. And, potentially, it makes things that much more difficult, going forward.

  Or does it?

  Ginger stares intently down at Helen, to avoid looking at him, a fragile uncertainty in her cant and posture.

  “All that stuff about your boyfriend . . . ?”

  “Husband. He’s dead. He was an asshole and he’s dead, and I don’t miss him.” She stops there, suggesting she’d decided there’s nothing more to explain.

  “Did you—?”

  “—Kill him? No. Public loves his fictions. I told you. It makes him feel like Zeus. Looking down on us mere mortals.”

  “And Helen?”

  “What about her?”

  “She a Fed?”

  Ginger can’t help but laugh. “No.”

  “But not your daughter.”

  There’s a long hesitation before she admits, “No. No she’s not.” She starts to tell him the story, how Helen’s parents were bad guys, bad people, killed by some other bad people, Helen saw it, and because of what she saw and because the killers fled the country and are still at large and know she saw them Helen’s at risk, and under the protection of the Marshal Service. But Jay hears only half of it; he watches as Ginger sweeps the hair back off her face again, gathers it at her neck, and ties a fat knot with it to hold it there. She doesn’t look like a Fed. None of the steady cast of appraising eye, she’s all over the place, nervous, shy, vulnerable. She looks like a work in progress, mercurial, a young woman who got to be a mom before she thought she was ready, discovered she was good at it and enjoyed it so much she doesn’t want to think about what might happen if someone decides to un-mom her.

  “Does she remember what happened?”

  “The doctors say maybe, maybe not, she was too young. But she hasn’t talked since it happened, either, so . . .”

  “Right.” Jay can’t help adding, for the irony: “Maybe she does remember, and she’s just not saying.”

  Evidently, Ginger doesn’t like the easy familiarity of this. She stands up, hands on hips, hair flowing: half a goddess, at least.

  Jay stands up with her. “You love her,” he says, finally.

  “I was assigned to her,” Ginger says, evasive.

  “Oh. Is that all it is?”

  “To protect her.”

  “Right. Like a mom,” Jay says.

  “Yeah.”

  “And one thing led to another.”

  Ginger snaps at him: “It’s not the same, okay? It’s not the same thing as . . . this. You and me. It’s not.”

  Jay waits for her to calm. She unknots her hair, and combs at it with her fingers. She smooths her jeans with her palms. There are tears in her eyes, and she doesn’t wipe them away.

  “They’ll take her away from you,” he says quietly. “Sooner or later.”

  It’s a cheap shot, and he regrets it the moment after he says it. Ginger goes very quiet. She nods. “I know.”

  “I just mean—”

  “I know what you mean,” she interjects, without any bitterness. “Don’t make me choose, Jay,” she says. “This was a sweet, sweet dumbass gesture, to be sure, and maybe, I don’t know, heroic, even, but . . . There’s no happy ending here. Not for us. I’m just the inside guy, waiting for you to tell me what you know.”

  “Why don’t I believe that?”

  Her smile breaks his heart. Waves lap the rocks, brittle-sounding. Helen has drifted farther down the shore, out of earshot. Jay glances over at the grim Feds in the golf cart.

  “What do they want from me, Ginger?”

  Jay has to wait again. He’s not sure if she’s filtering what she’s going to tell him, or simply organizing it into a form he’ll easily understand. “They? We? Me?” She sighs, big sigh. “Last year we had this . . . problem. One of our guys, an unhappy marshal, went into business for himself. He had this list, of names—”

  “—on a flash drive.”

  “Yeah. Somebody else offered a whole lot of money for it.”

  “Somebody who wanted to make the people on the list disappear,” Jays says.

  “Worst case.”

  “When is it ever anything but a worst case?”

  “There was a meet. The deal going down. At
the strip club with the mermaids. But our unhappy marshal got himself killed. We got there too late. And the list is unaccounted for.” Ginger looks at him. “We—they, Public and Doe, and the people they answer to—think you saw who the shooter was.”

  “And the shooter will get them to the buyer.”

  Ginger doesn’t appear to feel the need to respond.

  Jay absorbs this. “Do you think that’s right?”

  Ginger says, “I think you should tell them the truth.”

  The silence that passes between them is thick with a weight of sober understanding, a connection Jay has never had with anyone. He can’t explain it. This is life, he thinks. It matters, it’s messy, it’s ugly, it’s an act of faith. A leap into the darkness.

  Jay nods. “Yeah.” He wants to kiss her. It’s the craziest thing. Her eyes are dead and her hair is a tangle and needs washing. She looks wrung out, he realizes. Someone who’s been running an ultramarathon, and there’s still hours and miles to go. He asks her where they took her and Helen when they left the island.

  “Vegas,” she says. “So grim. Hellishly hot. Acres and acres of ambling ghost-town housing developments of foreclosed and repossessed properties we’ve been requisitioning for the program. Sketchy stucco split-levels with satellite dishes and three-car garages.

  “All these displaced people, living lies,” she says. And she admits, “I shouldn’t be telling you that.”

  Jay says it’s okay, he can keep secrets. Ask Helen, he wants to add.

  Ginger stares at him for a long time. “The unhappy marshal was my husband,” Ginger says then, emptily, and walks down to the water, to Helen.

  Jay’s mind reels. But he hears himself call after her, defiant, “I don’t care.”

  She stops and turns and pulls her hair back again. Just holding on to it, this time. The sun unforgiving on her face as she looks back at him puzzled. “What?” she says. She heard him, though. He’s sure of it.

  “I don’t care,” he tells her, meaning everything: the bad husband, the lie she’s lived, the part she’s played in this. “It’s okay. Doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything.”

  She shakes her head and asks him something, but he can’t hear her over the surf breaking on the rocks.

  “Say again?”

  “After everything. After all this,” she says. “How can you trust me?”

  This, he knows, is the question he should be asking himself. But he’s not. And he won’t.

  Jay shrugs. “How can you trust anybody, Ginger?”

  | 28 |

  THIS IS WHAT HE REMEMBERS:

  A mermaid, roiling the petite sea of her giant barroom beaker with shimmering bubbles and fractured light, arms graceful, tail coiling. The flower girl; his flower girl. Loin-thrilling, wanton, siren-smiling, unreal. She arcs up, her breasts rippling buoyant. Waves at him. Waves a goofy little girl wave—

  “There’s a lot of it I don’t understand,” he says.

  In the stolid office, number 204, chairs facing, Jay and Magonis are staged for what Jay hopes will be the last time.

  “Nobody expects you to.”

  To say that Jay has a plan would be generous. He has an intention, a direction, a goal—or maybe just a destination. And an irrepressible, blind, obdurate determination to reach it, by whatever means necessary. “I didn’t . . .”

  “Just tell us what you saw, Jay. That’s all we’re asking.”

  Jay knows that’s not true.

  His eyes have found the four, small, wireless video cameras: mounted on the bookshelf (high and wide), between the pictures on the cabinet behind the desk (low and wide), in the air-conditioning duct (side view), and on the windowsill (tight over the shoulder) behind the chair where Magonis hunches, chewing a fingernail, his hat hair evidently an afterthought today, ill-combed and crooked.

  Multiple angles. Discreet placement. Jay’s got an audience of more than one. Doe? Public? Someone they answer to? At Cate, junior year, he played Banquo in Macbeth, but forgot his lines during the dress rehearsal and was replaced opening night by Vaughn.

  Jay closes his eyes.

  “First off—”

  He imagines: Vaughn, plunging awkwardly into the mermaid tank, fully clothed, lab coat trailing white filaments as if of chalky melt, and tangling around him as he churns his arms and curves upright and peers out at Jay, scared—

  “—Vaughn.” Jay opens his eyes. “He’s not involved.”

  “So you’ve said.”

  “In any way. He’s an accident of intersect.”

  “That’s an interesting way of phrasing it.”

  “Passing through,” Jay says. “I just want everybody to be very, very clear about that, whatever happens, and leave him alone.”

  “Whatever happens?”

  Jay worries he’s said too much. “Maybe they think they can use him to get to me. Or they’ve misinterpreted our friendship to imply collaboration. I don’t know, but I just know, I’m telling you, he’s . . .”

  Magonis nods. “Okay.” But he’s evidently not convinced. “Manchurian Global does a lot of government contract work, CIA stuff. You don’t think—”

  “No no, this isn’t anything like that, it’s not spies, man. Jesus. How cheesy would that be?” Jay says.

  “Oh.”

  There’s something in Magonis’s tone when he says this; Jay’s eyes narrow. “I mean—or would it be?”

  Magonis just waits.

  “Spies?”

  With his good eye, Magonis studies his bit-down nail.

  “No . . .” Jay says, thinking it through aloud. “It’s something stupid, isn’t it? Like revenge or greed or—”

  “Jay.”

  He remembers, in a dizzying rush:

  “—or love.”

  Liquid darkness of the strip club, thump of bass notes, smell of liquor and desperation, stray light striating across Jay as he drifted in, sifting through the beaded curtain just past the bouncer at the door. The flower girl, tight black T-shirt half-hiding her snake tattoo, looked out at him, amber-eyed, from behind the bar, where she poured out martinis from a shaker. The luminous tank threw its rippling glow across the room, across the lumpen hunched figures in cane chairs nursing drinks, eyes fixed on the show, and, yes, the flower-girl-now-turned-mermaid, naked breasts pressed pale pink flat against the transparent swerve of the tank, and—

  boom

  The tank exploded. Water and glass.

  Magonis, wondering: “Jay?”

  Entropy.

  Parking lot.

  Static crush of cars glinting streetlight, the smell of smog and sea, the deafening hush of an L.A. night, a thin sheen of night dew on the asphalt and the harlequin neon of the strip bar slowly flickering—shorting out—dying as Jay ran from the doorway of the club, across the wet pavement, with a mermaid in his arms—

  Jay looks at his hands. Magonis clears his smoker’s throat and waits.

  “I went hoping maybe I could take her out for coffee or something after, like the last time. Still, I don’t know. The embarrassment. It was a spin cycle: longing, lust, the sweaty entanglement, the slow-dawning shame, then retreat. To Stacy. And repeat.

  “That I couldn’t get her out of my head, just finally gave way to, after a while, sure, I just wanted her.” Jay goes quiet, with some thinking. He doesn’t want to go too fast, but it’s iffy what he’s got under control here and what’s simply spilling out in confession.

  “I wanted her. But. Strippers.” He sighs. “It’s not a game with them. You know? Or it’s the right game, which, I know, is kinda fucked-up, unless you see it as a romantic thing. Old school. And foolish beyond belief.

  “Save the lost girl, with your noble intentions, your roll of money, your fast car. Take her home, make her real. Suburbia. Babies. But, still, after, in the dark . . .

&
nbsp; “Ba-boom.”

  Magonis notes that this sounds like something Jay read in Esquire, if it’s still in print, or Maxim. Jay allows that both are, and it might be, but argues that Magonis is of the generation that produced Hefner and Norman Mailer, so if it is some banal macho fantasy maybe it’s generationally immutable.

  “Truth is. I was bored with my girlfriend,” Jay admits.

  Magonis just nods.

  “Pissed off at her or maybe just at my life in general, which was, you gotta admit after all you’ve heard, really one long relentless pointless chore.”

  Magonis shifts in his chair, trying to find a comfortable position. On the exhale: “Okay. That’s interesting and everything, Jay, and we could spend a few years on the couch examining the roots of it, but—”

  “—No, it’s relevant to this,” Jay insists. “Because expectation goes to the heart of what you see, do you know what I mean? You see what you prepare yourself for seeing.” He sits forward in his chair, intent on Magonis. “And what you don’t expect, can’t . . . doesn’t . . . hold. We don’t really see what we’re surprised by. It goes by too fast. That’s my theory.”

  “And?”

  “That night the bar was filled to capacity, mostly men, the kind who say ‘titties.’ Vacant expressions, or hard, or lonely. A couple bachelor parties of frat brothers drunk as pigs. Laughing, reeling, shadowy smears in the dark recesses of the place, hustling the one waitress for a lap dance she wasn’t for any amount of money going to do.

  “The smell of chlorine from the tank, the pop and hissing of an air compressor, the dreamy unreality of night, and the naked, unedited lust. As if you just—”

  The air compressor, upstairs where the mermaids dressed and slipped into the tank, was totally inaudible in the bar below. So as not to break the illusion. Plus, all that fucking rave mix music—

  A white lie.

  “—stepped off into another dimension,” Jay finishes. He grins warily at Magonis, who seems, so far, engaged.