by Lou Berney
“I advise you to get some sleep if you can,” the sheriff said. “You want an extra blanket, I’ll fetch you one.”
“That professional,” Guidry said, “right after he pulled the trigger, he stopped being a solution, though. He became a problem. Didn’t he? For the people who hired him. You can understand why.”
The sheriff said nothing. He balanced his brush on the lip of a paint pot so that he could massage his fingers.
“The people who hired him needed to fix the problem,” Guidry said. “You’re the solution. Until you hand me over at least, and guess what you are then?”
Guidry measured each breath and let the minutes crawl past. Know when to yank your line, know when to play it out. Every boy in Ascension Parish grew up fishing.
The sheriff was a smart man. Guidry hoped so anyway. Smart but not too smart. That was Guidry’s only chance. The shot he had to make was one in a thousand, too.
An hour passed. Two. Guidry was running out of them.
“Well, doggone, I done it again.” The sheriff, still painting away, dipped the corner of a napkin in his coffee mug and dabbed at his canvas. “Seems like the more careful you are, the more mistakes you make.”
“They’ll kill you,” Guidry said. “Just tell me you understand that and I’ll be quiet. You know too much, Sheriff. You’re a liability, just like me.”
“That’s your opinion,” the sheriff said.
“How long have you been in Carlos’s pocket?”
“I don’t see it that way.”
“Of course you don’t,” Guidry said. “Just a little extra work on the side. Skim the cream from the jukebox take and nobody gets hurt. What’s the harm?”
“You ever decide about that extra blanket?” the sheriff said. “It’ll get chilly here in a bit.”
“They’ll kill you, and then they’ll go find Fred and kill him,” Guidry said. “If you have a wife, they’ll kill her, too, just in case you mentioned anything to her. You can’t blame them for being thorough, so much at stake. They’ll probably go kill that girl who works at the diner. Annabelle? After they find out what she knows. Is your wife pretty? I hope not. Who do you think these people are, you dumb, crooked hick? What made you think you could sell them one part of your soul and not all of it?”
The sheriff’s hand had stopped moving again. After a minute he set the brush down and started to screw the lids back on all the paint pots, one by one.
“There’s a way out, Sheriff,” Guidry said. “I can show it to you.”
“Get some sleep, son,” the sheriff said.
“Who do you work for in Dallas? Howie Fleck? Call Howie Fleck and tell him you made a mistake, turns out your deputy picked up the wrong man. His wife from Amarillo showed up and took him home, false alarm.”
The sheriff put his boots up on the desk. He leaned back in his creaking chair and tilted his hat down over his face.
“Hold on, I’ve a better idea,” Guidry said. “Do you know anybody around here who looks like me? Height, coloring. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just in the ballpark. Let your visitors see for themselves that you landed the wrong fish. Say, ‘Sorry for the bother, boys.’ Say, ‘Better safe than sorry.’”
The sheriff didn’t stir. Guidry stretched out on the cot. Now wait and see. That was all he could do. He’d made his play, the speech of a lifetime. The dice rolled off his fingertips and tumbled across the felt.
He tried to empty his mind. Socrates, the night before they brought the hemlock. In India, Guidry had read somewhere, certain shamans and sadhus could slow their breathing, could slow the beating of their hearts down to just a dribble. Maybe he could pull that off himself. When Seraphine’s men arrived, they’d think he was already dead.
Socrates or Sophocles? Guidry could never keep their deaths straight. One was forced to drink poison, the other died when he tried to recite an impossibly long line of poetry without taking a breath. One of his buddies had dared him.
Guidry thought about what he’d do when the sheriff handed him over in the morning. He would go for the gun on the sheriff’s hip. Hopeless, but he wasn’t going to let Seraphine’s men take him alive, not if he could help it.
The linoleum squeaked. Guidry opened his eyes. He must have fallen asleep. He wondered how long he’d been lying there. The sheriff stood on the other side of the bars.
“When do you expect they’ll get here?” the sheriff said.
Guidry sat up. He looked at his watch. Five o’clock in the morning, Monday. “An hour or so.”
The sheriff unlocked the cell. He handed Guidry back his wallet and car keys. “Go.”
“Good luck, Sheriff,” Guidry said.
“Go to hell,” the sheriff said.
Guidry drove all morning. West of Tucumcari, New Mexico, the sleet hissed sideways. He passed a broken-down car by the side of the road, a woman standing drenched next to it and two children staring out the back window.
He didn’t slow up. Sorry, sister. Guidry had trouble all his own and didn’t need to borrow any.
12
Monday morning Charlotte and the girls left McLean just after dawn. Near Amarillo it began to rain softly and then harder and then so hard that the headlights of approaching cars fluttered like candle flames. The rain seemed to be coming from every direction at once, front and back and below, the spray off the road pounding the floor beneath her feet.
When they stopped for gas, the station attendant leered at Charlotte as he checked the oil. He unsheathed the metal wand and pretended to run his tongue along the length of it. Charlotte stared down at her hands in her lap. Thank God the girls were busy charting their journey on the map.
She handed the station attendant a five-dollar bill for the gas. He handed back her change and continued to leer. She didn’t know what to say.
“Thank you,” she said.
She was shaking as they drove off. It’s fine, she told herself. It will be fine.
Soon after they crossed from Texas into New Mexico, the rain turned to sleet and the asphalt shimmered like glass, and when the road curved unexpectedly, they slid into a ditch.
It happened so quickly. Charlotte felt the car floating beneath her, and then the steering wheel jerked out of her hands. Joan tumbled against Rosemary, who tumbled against the dog, who woke up and barked once, uncertainly.
The ditch was shallow, only a foot or two deep, but the nose of the car seemed to point straight up. All Charlotte could see out the windshield was the long, putty-colored hood of the car and an empty sky almost the exact same shade. The engine had died, and the silence buzzed.
“Are you all right?” Charlotte asked the girls.
“What happened?” Rosemary said.
“Girls! Are you all right?”
“Yes,” Rosemary said.
“Joan?”
“Yes.”
The girls climbed onto the seat so that they could look out. They were flushed and thrilled. “We’ve had an automobile accident!” Rosemary said.
Charlotte pushed her door open. She climbed the bank of the ditch to inspect their situation. Bad. The car appeared to be hopelessly wedged, the back tires buried in the mud and the front tires suspended a foot off the ground, rotating lazily.
Take a deep breath. It was fine. It will be fine.
“Are we stuck, Mommy?” Rosemary said.
“Wait here,” Charlotte said. “Put on your coats and curl up next to Lucky. Pretend he’s a friendly bear in the woods.”
Cars splashed past, one after another, not even slowing. Charlotte stood by the side of the road until she was soaked to the bone and shivering. Take another deep breath. It was one o’clock in the afternoon on a main highway. Someone, eventually, would stop. According to the map, the next town, Santa Maria, New Mexico, was only a few miles away.
Finally a tow truck rumbled past, braked, and pulled onto the shoulder. Santa Maria Wreck and Repair. A stone-faced mechanic climbed out of the truck. He examined the car from various angles
, grunted a few times, shook his head. He fished the chewing tobacco from his cheek and flung the dark, bristling lump onto the sleet-slick road.
“Ain’t your lucky day,” he said.
Charlotte was so cold that her teeth had begun to chatter. She’d always thought that was just a figure of speech, the chattering of teeth. “Can you get us out?” she said.
“Folks always take that curve too fast,” he said. “Keeps me in business.”
“Can you get us out?”
“Fifteen dollars.”
He couldn’t be serious. “Fifteen dollars?” she said.
“Let me know if you find a better price.” He turned and started walking to his truck.
“Wait.”
The mechanic backed up his truck and chained their car to it. He gunned his engine, and their car began to rock. Finally it came loose from the mud with a wet, sucking sound.
Charlotte saw that the rear fender had been badly dented in the crash, one taillight smashed, the exhaust pipe mangled.
The mechanic’s lump of chewing tobacco sat leaking on the road like some organ torn from a body and discarded, like a heart beating one last time. The mechanic walked a slow circle around the car. He shook his head.
“Still ain’t your lucky day, is it?” he said.
They crammed into the cab of the truck with him, Charlotte and the girls and the dog, too. In town he dropped them off at a motel with whitewashed adobe bungalows arranged around an empty swimming pool. He told her that he wouldn’t be able to get to the car until Wednesday.
“Wednesday?” Charlotte said. “But that’s two days from now. Isn’t there any way … ?”
“Wednesday maybe,” he said. “Come by in the afternoon and I’ll let you know. Otherwise it’ll be the Monday after, ’cause of Thanksgiving.”
He drove away. It was almost two by now. The girls were starving. Charlotte bought two cartons of chocolate milk from a vending machine, and they ate the last of the roast-beef sandwiches. The clouds paled a bit, and the rain stopped. Their room was no nicer than the one in McLean, but at least it didn’t smell like boiled cabbage. She waited until the girls were absorbed with their Disney True-Life Adventures books, warned them not to unlock the door for anyone but her (“Anyone. Do you understand, Rosemary?”), and followed the stone path back to the main building.
There was a pay phone on the porch in front of the motel office. Charlotte paged through her address book until she found what she hoped was still Aunt Marguerite’s number in Los Angeles. She lifted the handset and told the operator she wanted to make a long-distance call. The operator instructed her to insert fifty cents.
Charlotte dialed the number and waited. She counted the rings. One, two, three. Charlotte didn’t worry. Four, five, six. Marguerite might be out shopping, or at lunch with friends, or outside tending to her rosebushes. It was likely. It was possible. Seven, eight, nine.
Midway through the twelfth ring, Charlotte hung up. She searched her purse for cigarettes. New Mexico, or at least this part of it, was flat and brown and empty. Apart from the whitewashed adobe bungalows, the ornamental stump-shaped cactus next to the motel drive, a faint smudge of what could be mountains on the horizon, Charlotte might as well have still been in Oklahoma.
She lifted the receiver and told the operator that she’d like to make a collect call.
“Charlie?” Dooley said.
“Hello, honey,” Charlotte said.
“What in the world, Charlie! I came home last night and you were gone and the girls were gone, and I about had a heart attack.”
“I know, I’m sorry. Did you see the note I left for you?”
“I went in their bedroom and their little beds were empty, and you can’t even imagine how that made me feel, Charlie.”
The guilt she’d managed to keep at a low simmer, deep in the pit of her stomach, began to churn and bubble and spill hissing over the lip of the cauldron. “I know, I’m sorry,” she said. “Did you see the note?”
“This morning I did,” he said. “Last night I could barely sleep, I was so worried sick.”
“We’re fine, the girls are fine,” Charlotte said. “We’re in New Mexico. We had a little accident, with the car, but—”
“New Mexico!” Dooley said. “What’s gotten into you, Charlie?”
“I think this is for the best, honey, I do. For all of us. I think—”
“What happened to the car? Charlie, you don’t want a divorce. I know you don’t.”
“I can’t keep on this way, Dooley. This isn’t what …” Charlotte couldn’t explain it to herself. How could she ever hope to explain it to him? “I’m not … I’m not the person I want to be. Maybe I’ll never be, but I need the chance. I need the girls to have the chance, too, to be the people they want to be. If I don’t go away, I’m afraid that—”
“Go away? You mean you need a vacation?”
“No. I—”
“You can’t do this to me, Charlie,” Dooley said. “A divorce, just like that, out of the blue. Without even talking to me about it?”
“Dooley …”
“It’s not right, Charlie, making a decision like that all by yourself and I don’t even have a say in it. It’s like you snuck up behind me out of nowhere and hit me over the head with a two-by-four. What married people do, they discuss their problems.”
Over the years she’d tried to get him to discuss their problems hundreds of times. Still, though, she asked herself if his point might be a fair one. She’d been a coward, fleeing the house when he wasn’t there, when he couldn’t try to talk her into staying. She should at least have waited for him to come home. Or she could have proposed a trial separation. She could propose one now.
Divorce was the edge of a cliff. Once you flung yourself into the great blue yonder, there was no going back… .
It infuriated Charlotte, how doubt crept into her every thought, her every decision. This was it, exactly what Charlotte had meant a moment ago: I’m not the person I want to be.
“Dooley, I think—”
“You think. You think, Charlie. That’s what I mean. You don’t know. Tell me you know for sure. Say it out loud. Say, ‘I want a divorce. I’m one hundred percent sure.’ Can you say that?”
“I … I don’t know if anything in life is one hundred percent sure,” she said. “Is it?”
“Marriage is,” Dooley said. “That’s what we told the priest, wasn’t it? Till death do us part. We made a vow to each other that …” She heard him opening cabinet doors. “Where’s the sugar for the coffee, Charlie?”
“On the shelf next to the refrigerator,” she said.
He started to cry. “Oh, God, Charlie, what would I do without you? You and the girls, you’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”
“You’ll still get to see the girls,” she said. “I’ll make sure of it, I promise. I—”
“I’m just a sorry son of a bitch. I know I am.”
“You’re not, Dooley. You’re not listening to me.”
The sky had darkened again, giant stacked slabs of slate-gray clouds. Charlotte thought of collapsed fortress walls, the lids of ancient tombs. She was exhausted suddenly, too tired to think.
A few drops of rain plinked against the tin roof of the overhang, and then without further preamble a great pounding deluge swept down. A man in a suit, another guest at the hotel, made it to shelter just in time.
“I’m a sorry son of a bitch,” Dooley said, “but I love you. Nobody will ever love you like I do. Why do you want to throw that away?”
“I have to go, honey,” Charlotte said. “Someone else needs to use the phone.”
“You don’t want a divorce, Charlie, not really. You don’t want to throw everything away. Just come on home. We’ll discuss it. That’s all I want to do.”
“I’ll call you soon.”
“So just come on home, Charlie,” Dooley said. “You know you’ll come home. You know you will. I’m not mad. Just—”
Charlotte hung up before he—or she—could say anything else. The man in the suit gave her a friendly smile as they passed.
“When it rains, it pours, doesn’t it?” the man said.
She nodded and managed to smile back. “Yes, it certainly does.”
13
They left Houston just around eleven o’clock and drove all night. Well, the colored kid drove all night. Barone stayed awake to make sure the kid stayed awake. Theodore. That was the kid’s name. Theodore, don’t call me Ted, don’t call me Teddy. He griped about the way the Pontiac handled and about the weather and about the road and about his high school back in Houston and about his four older sisters who still treated him like a baby even though he was a growed-up man, sixteen years old. He griped that he was hungry and he griped that he was tired. They listened to a radio station out of Dallas that played colored soul singers. Barone didn’t mind Sam Cooke. He couldn’t find a station that played jazz.
“Who you after anyways?” the kid said.
“A man,” Barone said.
“Why you after him? He steal your woman?”
“He owes me money.”
“How much?” the kid said.
“Enough,” Barone said.
“I want to be a lawyer.”
“A lawyer.”
“There’s colored lawyers,” the kid said.
“I never said there weren’t.”
“What kind of work you do?”
“I’m a colored lawyer,” Barone said.
“Shoot,” the kid said. “You a salesman. What I think. Or work in a company.”
“That’s right.”
“You like it? The kind of work you do?”
Barone had never given it much thought. Might as well ask, You like who you are? Nobody had a say in the matter.
“I know a colored lawyer,” Barone said. “She’s like a lawyer.”
The kid swiveled around to goggle at him. “She? A lady colored lawyer?”
“I said she’s like a lawyer.”
“Hoo-wee.”
