Hostile witness vc-1

by William Lashner

  When I collapsed on top of her, my weight pressing her legs onto the mattress, she jerked her arms as high as the scarves would allow and let out a howl that sounded like the baying of a great wounded cat, golden, striped, saber-toothed.

  I rested there, just like that, still inside her, lying atop her like a corpse. I might have dozed off, I couldn't tell, but it seemed like I lay atop her for the longest time. She said nothing, made no movement to shrug me off. There was a silence about us, a haze that only slowly lifted as the sounds of cars slipping along the cobblestones of Church Street edged their way through the quiet. In my chest I could feel a strange asynchronous heartbeat – ba ba boom boom, ba ba boom ba boom, boom ba ba boom boom, ba boom ba boom, ba ba boom boom. I worried for a moment, thinking the intensity of the sex had chased me into arrhythmia, but then I realized my chest was pressing so hard onto hers that I was feeling both our beats. I pushed myself up with weary arms and squatted atop her. She was still tied up and the fact that I remained in control thrilled me. I cupped her left breast with my hand and squeezed her nipple between my fingers. Her eyes stayed closed but her pretty face twisted into something carnal and pained.

  Without opening her eyes she said, "God, I'm sick of old men."

  And that was when I ordered her to tell me about how she ended up with Jimmy Moore. She struggled a bit, and tried again to yank her arms loose. I kissed her gently on her lips, on her cheek, on her eyes, on her lips again, the softness of my kisses calming her. Her eyes were still closed. I rubbed my hands across her sides and said, "Tell me," and so she told me.

  She was born in Iowa, she said as I rubbed my tongue across the lower edge of her breast, in a small town west of Cedar Rapids called Solon. In Solon the kids used to hang out at Jones's House of Pork and eat fried tenderloin sandwiches as big as a head and play pool, a quarter a game, and grow fat and pimply. It was a small town, not far from a lake where they swam on sweltering summer days, and there was a city park and an American Legion baseball team and once a year the town would gussy itself up for Solon Beef Days and people would come in from all over eastern Iowa and there would be carnival rides and a parade and a steak dinner with corn and salad for $2.79 served under a tent.

  Her father taught at the university, about thirty minutes south of Solon, medieval history, and at night he would tell her tales of kings and queens and bloody princes until she knew more about the House of York than the House of Pork. Her dream, always, as long as she could remember, was to marry a prince and live in a castle and hold court. She didn't know if there were any princes left in the world or if they had grown extinct, like dinosaurs, but she knew for sure that there weren't any princes in Iowa.

  Her mother she remembered only from photographs, tall, plain, an intense concern grooved into the flesh around her eyes. Maybe she could see into the future, Veronica said, and see her early, painful death from a burst appendix. She was a fine woman, Veronica's father had told her, strong, gentle. Veronica's father was on a trip east, lecturing at Princeton, and her mother hadn't told anyone about the pain, certain it would go away like an upset stomach, unwilling to leave her baby daughter to find a doctor. Her father had flown to Princeton a promising young scholar and had flown back a widower with a baby daughter to raise alone. He was totally gray before he turned forty.

  She went to the University of Iowa and pledged a sorority and dated football players and golfers and in the homecoming parade sat decked out like Princess Di on a sorority float made out to be Buckingham Palace. When she had the chance to go to London for her junior year she jumped at it. Her father died while she was away, a sudden heart attack, and she returned just long enough to bury him and sell the house in Solon and cash out his pension before returning to England, an orphan with money to spend. That's where she met a boy named Saffron Hyde.

  "He was a poet," she told me. "I met him in a pub in Southgate, a rock club. He came up to me and asked me to buy him a pint and I did. He was skinny and nervous and unlike anyone I had ever met before. There were no Saffron Hydes in Iowa. I had an apartment in the North End and he came home with me that night, more like a stray puppy dog than a seducer, but he moved in the next day. We drank a lot, I quit school, he wrote poetry about me, we made sweet love, but he wasn't really interested, which was fine, actually, and every night we went to the art films at the museum."

  "What was his poetry like?" I asked.

  "Dark, jittery. Much of it was very funny, but there was always a black loneliness behind the jokes. I thought it breathtaking."

  "Did he publish it?"

  "No. He let me see it, some of his friends, but that was it. He said it was the poetry that mattered, not how many people read it."

  "That sounds like an excuse."

  "Well, he was a great one for excuses."

  "How did he live? How did he support himself?"

  "I supported him."

  "And before you?"

  She shrugged, an absurd little shrug, calm and matter-of-fact, despite her wrists being bound to the bedposts. "I didn't ask, he never said."

  "Did you love him?"

  "More than anything before or since. He was the love of my life, the prince I had been dreaming of since my girlhood. So when he burst in one afternoon, drunk and full of excitement, and said we just had to go to India, I said 'When,' he said, 'Right this instant,' I said, 'Fine.'"

  They took the ferry and backpacked through Europe, Spain, France, Holland, Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia, living like royalty, for backpackers, staying in pensions and rooming houses, eating in restaurants with tablecloths. They took a meandering route, flitting off to wherever seemed the most interesting, but always heading east, taking trains, hitchhiking, boats, Greece, Crete, Turkey, Iran, always on a route toward India. He had to see the Ganges, he said, bathe himself in the holy river, tap into a spiritual source centuries older than his Saxon heritage. He had read Hermann Hesse, it had changed his life, he needed to immerse himself in the sacred waters, he said.

  "Remember when Hermann Hesse used to change lives?" I asked.

  "You have to read it at a certain age," she said.

  "I read Siddhartha when I was fourteen," I said. "I think I was too old even then."

  "That's to your pity."

  It was a wonderful trip, she continued, revelatory actually. She was ecstatic and the further away she moved from Iowa the freer she became, swimming naked in the public beaches on the French Riviera, trading her blue jeans for peasant skirts in Corfu, buying drugs in the open-air markets outside Constantinople.

  "Drugs?" I asked.

  "Yes, that was Saffron at the start, big spliffs of hash in the rock clubs in Amsterdam, than later cocaine in Florence and Greece. I didn't join in at first, but as we continued, the trip seemed more and more dreamlike. Drugs just seemed to fit in."

  "That was pretty stupid for an American."

  "Yes, but after a while we seemed to have stripped away our nationalities, we were just travelers. It was no longer the goal of India propelling us forward, it was just the urge to move, to see more, to go ever further on. Then in Iran, on the way to Pakistan, we had the accident."

  They had tried to catch the bus from Teheran but it was full, and the next day's was full too. They didn't know when there would be an opening, but at the bus station there was a man, black silk shirt, gap-toothed smile. He sidled up and said he was going to the border and would take them for a small fee, less than the bus, only 2,000 toman. The next thing they knew they were in the back seat of a battered blue Mercedes van, sitting on stiff seats with no padding, the van filled with women in black chador holding babies, unshaven men sweating in their grimy shirts, two handsome young men drinking orange Schwepps. With the top of the van piled high with luggage they barreled down the hills outside Teheran, past signs with warnings of falling rocks, into the salt desert on the ancient silk road into Pakistan. They discovered shortly into the trip that the other travelers were being smuggled out of the country, dissidents, young me
n trying to skip the army service, and the surreptitious nature of the journey thrilled Saffron no end. In a late evening rest stop just outside Isfahan they had drunk some bad water and now Saffron was throwing up, to the amusement of the other passengers, sticking his head out a window, banging his cheek on the frame, heaving loudly, the van shaking like a carnival ride. At a narrow switchback just through one of the tunnels south of Isfahan on the way to Shiraz, the driver barely braked as he swung wildly around, descending into the darkness, the van tilting over the hill as it rushed into the turn. A truck coming up the other way blared its horn and the driver swerved right, the wheels slipped off the road, and, like a gymnast in slow motion, the van tumbled down, down the slope, falling down until it broke apart on a rocky desert ledge.

  Veronica had been fine, a bruised shoulder, a sprained wrist, but Saffron, sitting beside the window, had been a mess. In the Shiraz hospital where they had been taken, the doctors set his broken arm and stitched up the gashes in his face, but the real problem was his back, a compression fracture of three vertebrae, which Saffron was adamant about not letting the Iranian doctors set. Instead he gritted his teeth through the pain and, once released, took the next bus out, a modern bus with padded seats and shock absorbers and a bathroom in the back. By the time they reached Pakistan, Saffron was delirious with pain, crying out for drugs, limping alone into the first market he could find and bringing back a reddish gray powder, a local herb, he said, which he snorted first and then mixed with tobacco and smoked and which seemed to give him some measure of blessed relief. She tried it too, mixed with the tobacco of a cigarette.

  "It was sweet, numbing, terrific really," she said. "Later I found out it was heroin, but I didn't know at first and when I found out it was too late."

  "You really didn't know?"

  "I was from Iowa. Within a week he was shooting up three times a day and I was joining him. Everything after that turned into a nightmare, unreal, smoky, disastrous."

  "Jesus."

  "Untie me, Victor."

  I untied her. Without rubbing her wrists she pulled her arms tight into her torso and turned away from me. I put my hand on her arm to reassure her but she shrugged me off. I didn't want to hear any more, I wished I had never asked the question about her and Jimmy, wondered how the councilman entered into her story anyway.

  "Through Pakistan and India he grew thinner and thinner, he was skinny to begin with, but he turned into a ghost. All night he shook, he sweated, his teeth started falling out. He was feverish. I begged him to come with me to America to get treatment. I told him they would fix his back, get him off the drug, we could live in Iowa, I told him, or New York, but he insisted on reaching the Ganges. His arm got infected, it swelled, it began to stink, he started limping from an abscess in his foot. His fever made him delusional in the nights. He was too weak to carry anything, so I emptied out half my stuff and put his clothes in my pack. He stopped eating anything but fruit, drank only water. He could barely talk when we arrived in Varanasi. We went right to the river and he wrapped himself in a white sheet and stepped down the ghat, slowly, mournfully. He turned and waved at me and then stepped down into the water of the Ganges until he was submerged.

  "It was filthy, they were washing clothes, dumping sewage, it smelled like a latrine, shit and foam floated by, just upstream they were dumping ashes from the corpses ceremonially burned on the great pyres by the river. He was submerged for a long time, too long a time, and then I knew he would die in the river, his final wave was a wave good-bye, and I started running down after him. But he emerged, filthy, the white sheet covered with mud, his face serene, his eyes calm. His fever had broken. When he climbed out of the river he said, 'Okay, Ronnie. Take me to America.'

  "I put him in one of the whitewashed boarding houses they have just off the river and ran to a travel agent. There was just enough left in my account to buy two tickets to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, by way of New York. We would leave the next day. Thrilled, I rushed back to the room and discovered him dead. I found out later that the boarding house was primarily for old men who were coming to Varanasi to die and have their ashes scattered in the river. Before I left I arranged for him to be burned like the others, in his muddy sheet, and to have his ashes shoveled like manure into that fucking Ganges."

  "My God, Veronica."

  "I didn't wait for the funeral."

  "That is awful."

  She stayed on her side, facing away from me, silent, and I knew enough not to say anything. She lay there for five minutes, for ten. I lay on my back, my head atop my hands, thinking about the skinny dark poet with a name like Saffron entering the river bit by bit until he wasn't there anymore. Suddenly she flipped over until she was facing me and ran a finger lightly down my side.

  "So I cashed in his ticket," she said. "It was money, you know. I had to change planes in New York and realized the last place I wanted to go was Cedar Rapids, so I stayed. I got a job as a paralegal, hated it, I waited tables, hated it, I worked in a gallery, hated it, I tried modeling, they hated me, so I decided to go back to school. I got into Penn, which is how I ended up in Philadelphia, and how I met Norvel."

  "How did a Penn student meet a drug dealing scum like Norvel Goodwin?"

  "I looked for him."

  "I don't understand."

  "I was still hooked, Victor. Just because Saffron died didn't mean I was cured. I had a source in New York, but when I ended up at Penn, in West Philadelphia, I just walked into the neighborhood and started asking. He wasn't hard to find. He liked me right off, this pretty white girl stepping into his place and asking for a fix. We became a thing."

  "What about Jimmy in all this?"

  "Well, Norvel had a place in West Philly, about six blocks from campus. It was on Fifty-first Street, a shooting gallery of sorts, but not as bad as some of the places up north. Jimmy had lost his daughter only a few years before and was in full battle cry. A neighborhood group came to him about the house. He raised a mob of concerned citizens and raided the place with clubs and shovels and axes and baseball bats. I was there the night Jimmy smashed his way through the door. You should have seen him, his eyes fired, bashing anything in his way, knocking out windows, busting doors, slamming a television screen with a hatchet. He almost killed Norvel, dragged him out of a closet where Norvel had been hiding and started beating the hell out of him with his fists and then with a chair. Norvel's a big man, stronger than he looks, but Jimmy beat the hell out of him. And then he torched the place. He later said the drug dealers had set it on fire, but his people had quietly cleared the surrounding houses before they burst in. Two boys died in the fire, lost in a stupor in a hidden attic. They found them later, after the ashes had cooled."

  "What about you?"

  "He found me in a daze in a small room on the third floor and gave me to Chester to take to his car. Chester left me with the driver, who watched over me, made sure I didn't leave until it was over."

  "Who was that, Henry?"

  "No, Henry was inside. He was Norvel's partner at the time."

  "No."

  "Sure. And after that, after Henry cleaned himself up, Jimmy gave him a job, turned him into one of his models. Everyone Jimmy hires had a problem. That's so when he gives his speeches he can point with pride to his workers and lecture about how possible it is to change your life."

  "But what about you?"

  "After the fire, after the police came and went, after Jimmy had given his speeches for the news reporters in time for the eleven o'clock news, after everything was over, Jimmy came back to his car and took me to a private drug treatment center. He knew by then that I had been Norvel's girl. At the center they told him they didn't have any openings but then he started yelling about city council funding and I was admitted that night. I told him I didn't want it but I really did. I was ready. When I saw that house burn down I knew I was ready. I thought that would be it with Jimmy, but he kept on visiting me, my only visitor, hectoring me to kick my illness, taking me out
for ice cream. It may sound strange, since it was more than a year later, but that raid and the fire, that whole night was part of that accident south of Isfahan. It was Jimmy who pulled me from the twisted wreckage of that van. With his help I got clean – he saved my life. By that time, though, school was finished for me, I had incompleted everything. Jimmy got me the apartment in Olde City, he got me a job."