by John Enright
***
Denise was back. Her Bronco was parked in the driveway beside Nemo’s Lexus when Amanda and Morgan got back from Albany.
“That’s not good,” Morgan said.
“I’ll tell her,” Amanda said.
“No, let me. I’ll tell it so she will hear it loud and clear.”
Morgan went on up to her room. Amanda went out to the kitchen porch with a glass of iced tea to sit in Nemo’s chair there. It was such a beautiful day, the end of spring. Little brown birds, house wrens and sparrows, flitted back and forth from the garden to the gutters and eaves of the house, building nests that would have to be cleared out. For Amanda, back to nature meant the expense another season of neglect added onto bringing an old property back to saleable status. Nature was the enemy of real estate. Houses that sold well had been saved from nature and the history of decay. When you flipped a house you were selling the future not the past. Nobody actually lived in the past, especially people with money enough to buy a big house. Their past was what they were trying to escape. All obligations to memory ended when a place passed out of the family. Get real. Denise was history. Morgan and Amanda had agreed on that on the ride back.
Morgan came out to report that Nemo was asleep in her room and Denise’s door was closed.
“Asleep or comatose?” Amanda asked.
“He got up to get himself a cup of coffee at some point and he was snoring. I guess unconscious people can snore. I never thought about it before. I found the rental agreement—just thirty days notice not sixty. The sooner the better, I say. We don’t need their rent money any more and we don’t need the hassle.”
“There is the tax thing.”
“We’ll just keep it until someone figures out to take it away.”
“Denise will make a stink,” Amanda said. She dreaded confrontations.
“She’s a skunk. She always gets her way by raising her tail and threatening to make a stink. Fuck her.”
“She’s just back from one of her convocations. She’ll be filled with her Third Degree gas.”
“Let her explode.” Morgan came over and picked up the can with Nemo’s cigar butts and ashes. “Talk about stinking,” she said. She walked out into the garden and emptied the tin into one of the raised tomato beds. “Cuban compost,” she called it and she went back inside. It only took a few minutes before one and then another and another of the little brown birds came down and pecked at the cigar butts, flying back to their nests trailing thin strands of tobacco.
***
Morgan made the announcement at dinner with everyone there except Nemo. Amanda had taken a plate up to him in Morgan’s room. Because serious renovation work on the house was about to begin they would all have to leave within thirty days. The party was over, at least at this address. No more rent was due. Their security deposits would cover the last month, but that didn’t mean they could trash the place. It’s been fine, but it was time to move on. Denise walked out before Morgan was finished, saying “I don’t think so.”
Amanda followed Denise out of the kitchen, caught up with her as she started up the stairs. “Wait up, Denise. You knew this day was coming when you moved in. Well, that day is here. If you want to make it ugly, well, I guess you can, but it won’t change the outcome.” God, how she had come to dislike this woman. Amanda had always been slow to form dislikes. She prided herself on cutting others lots of slack. It was like food. She was an omnivore. Something had to be really yucky for her not to try it again. She had no allergies. People had to work at becoming unlikable. The list of people and things she disliked was very short. It took too much energy maintaining and feeding a hate list. She looked forward to erasing Denise from her life, moving on.
Denise stopped but didn’t turn around. Amanda was at the foot of the stairs, looking up at her wide flat butt in her baggy jeans, her thick ankles and swollen feet stuffed into Crocs, the folds of fat on her back above and below the wide strap of her bra beneath her T-shirt, the back of her helmet haircut of unwashed graying hair.
“You don’t get it, do you, you materialist whore?” Denise said without turning around. “There’s no way you can win. The powers are aligned against you. This house is ours now, no matter what you think, no matter how many lawyers in fancy cars you bring in. Don’t you know that if we did have to leave here I would have to burn the place to the ground, poison the well, and salt all the fields?”
“I’ll bring in the sheriff if I have to, Denise.”
“Just a charred hole in the ground. It will be our place or no place.” Denise continued on up the stairs. The rest of the girls now came streaming out of the kitchen and brushed past Amanda, following Denise up the stairs.
Back in the kitchen Morgan was rinsing and piling dinner dishes in the sink. “They didn’t even stay around to do their dishes,” Morgan said. “Is today the 21st?”
“Yes. Why?’
“Solstice. Litha Sabbat either tonight or tomorrow. That’s why Denise is back.”
***
When Amanda brought his dinner up she apologized for not inviting him down to dine with and meet everyone, but they would be having a house meeting and he would just be bored and feel out of place. It was just as well. Dominick didn’t feel up to socializing anyway, and if the rest of the girls were like the one he had met—Susan’s sister Kathy—their company would not improve his condition. He heard them all come up as a troop after dinner and then there was a spate of doors opening and closing and the toilet flushing. As a professional houseguest Dominick had experienced many strange situations over the years. People who seemed quite normal in the outside world could become weirdly bizarre inside their personal caves. He had taught himself to ignore it as much as possible. Privacy meant a lot to him, too. But this was a new one. A house full of women with locks on their doors. He wondered how many miles of toilet paper they went through in a year.
Amanda had brought him a glass of wine with his plate. The glass and the plate were now empty. He would like a refill of the glass. He opened the door and stuck his head out into the hall. All quiet there; just voices from behind a door at the far end. He took his empty plate and glass and went down to the kitchen. Amanda and Morgan were seated together at the long table. They looked up surprised when he came in. Dominick added his dirty dish to an unwashed pile in the sink then turned to them with his empty glass. “Mas vino, por favor?”
“It walks and it talks,” Morgan said.
“It sneaks up on people,” Amanda added. “Feeling better, brother?”
“Not so good that another glass of wine wouldn’t help.”
“In the door,” Morgan said, gesturing to the refrigerator, “an open chilled bottle of cheap Pinot Grigio waiting just for you.”
Dominick refilled his glass and joined them.
“You know, that and one or two of those oxys I gave you can magically transform pain into pleasure.” Morgan tapped his glass with a polished fingernail.
“I try to believe in magic,” he said. “If it were true it would help explain so many things so easily.”
“Save you a lot of time trying to figure things out for yourself, wouldn’t it?” Morgan said.
“All that cause and effect work. Instead, just Shazzam! Look, you guys got a full house here, and, Morgan, I’m sure you’d like your room back. I’ll be out of your hair tomorrow.”
“Do you think you’ll be well enough to drive?” Amanda asked. “You still look a little wobbly to me. You shouldn’t fool around with concussions.”
“Actually, it probably wouldn’t be a bad time to get out of here, at least as far as Catskill or Hudson,” Morgan said. “Just lousy timing. I’ll tell you why. Not because you’re not welcome here—you are—but because our little meeting tonight was to tell the girls that it was time for them to find another place to live, that we were moving ahead with the remodeling and they couldn’t stay. Evicting folks is the hardest part of this job, but there’s no avoiding it. So, tensions are running a little
high tonight, and it could get a little … chaotic here. Nothing to do with you or with our proposal, just something that your sister and I have to deal with if we’re going to move ahead on this. And we want you in on it. I had new corporation papers drawn up in Albany, with you and your sister as partners, vote determined by amount of investment. You’ve seen the place now. You can see its potential. All the pre-shovel stuff is done and paid for. We are ready to go. I’ve got a copy of the incorporation papers for you to look at. I want you to give our proposal your careful consideration, and, to be truthful, this probably won’t be the best place for that in the next couple of days. We’ll give you a ride into Catskill tomorrow, if you don’t feel up to driving. Tonight just rest and stay in the room.”
Chapter 10
Dominick was truly clueless. He just stood their like an idiot. His mouth was probably open. It was late. He had been studying the old papers and ledger he had taken from the trunk. The quill-pen writing was generally clear enough, but it was still old style script and slow going. Interesting stuff. He had come downstairs to borrow another glass of wine from the bottle in the fridge. The house seemed quiet. He thought he would sneak out onto the kitchen veranda and have a cigar with his nightcap.
As he came down the stairs to the front hall he noticed that the previously closed and locked sliding oak doors to what must be the front parlor were cracked open a foot, and an unsteady light and a woman’s voice came through. Of course he stopped to look. The aroma was burnt sage and sandalwood incense. The wavering light came from candles spaced around the room. There was a ring of young women, a half dozen or so, all dressed in simple white shifts or dresses, seated cross-legged on the floor, facing inward, their heads bowed. They were seated far enough apart so that each with her arms fully extended could hold the hand of the girl on either side. There were three banners on the walls—of an Egyptian looking eye, a Celtic shield knot, and what looked like a disc inside two reversed crescent moons. There was a table with candles and a white and yellow altar cloth draped over it showing a pentagram inside a circle. In front of the table, holding up a binder so that she could read by the candle light from behind her, was a stout older woman in a forest green hooded cape and glasses.
What was it about prayers? They were always said in a false voice not used on any other occasion, the oral equivalent of a fancy italic typeface. She could have been reading Portuguese and he still would have known it was a prayer. But she was reading in English: “I am clothed with the deep cool wonder of the earth and the gold of the fields heavy with grain. By me the tides of the earth are ruled, all things come to fruition according to my season. I am refuge and healing.”
Like a fool Dominick pushed the big door just a tad more open so that he could see more of the room. He was still holding his empty wine glass. The movement caught the green-hooded one’s attention, and her head jerked down so she could see him through the tops of her bifocals. “Who goes there?” she said in a boldface sans-serif voice. “No one dares break the sacred circle.”
The seated girls looked up and then followed her gaze to the door. “That’s him,” one of them said. The green-hooded one took of her glasses and put her book down on the altar, picking up what looked like a short legionnaire’s sword.
“Sorry,” Dominick said, “my mistake. Carry on.” And he stepped back into the hallway, sliding the door shut. He was quickly back in his room, without his glass of wine or cigar. No one followed him. He locked the door behind him. Who knew how ceremonial that sword was? He felt very foolish. As a boy he had once walked in on his mother as she was being “serviced” by one of her men on the living room couch. The man was on his knees on the floor in front of her, his face buried between her wide-spread legs making muffled noises. Marjorie had just stared at Dominick, neither upset nor embarrassed. She had just raised her hand from the back of the man’s head and with a little gesture told him to get lost. He felt a similar way now, a way only women could make him feel. Damn them.
***
Amanda stayed in her room in the morning. It was a Friday. Some of the girls had left for their jobs; but there were still a few other cars beside Denise’s and Nemo’s parked in the driveway. Amanda just wasn’t up for the next inevitable skirmish with Denise, back on the same kitchen battlefield. Later, maybe, when she had had time to regroup. She had Morgan bring her up a cup of coffee. Nemo must still be asleep. She had noticed that the lights in his room had stayed on late the night before.
“Let him sleep,” Morgan said. “Maybe with a good night’s sleep he’ll feel recovered enough to drive. Let him go. Right now we got our hands full with the witch goddess. I’ll catch up with Nemo later. He doesn’t need to see this. It could only turn him off.”
“By the way,” Amanda said, sipping her coffee, “you didn’t mention to me drawing up new articles of incorporation. If Nemo and I are partners, what are you?”
“Secretary/Treasurer and corporate counsel, just your servant, ma’am.”
“I’d like to see them, the new articles, I mean. Do you think he’ll go for it?”
“I haven’t the slightest. He’s a strange one alright. He’s smart, but he’s somewhere else altogether. He’s like the original lonely guy, only he doesn’t know it. Well, look who’s here.” Morgan was looking out the window at the driveway. “Deputy Dog.”
Amanda came over to the window. There was the Deputy Sheriff getting out of his big square vehicle with the rack of lights on top. There was a big number twelve painted on its roof. As they watched, Denise appeared and hurried out to talk to him. They couldn’t hear what was said, but Denise gestured toward the house several times and pointed at Nemo’s black car. The officer made a motion with his hand above his head, as if asking about someone’s height, then he ducked halfway back into his car and came out with a microphone on a long cord and spoke into it. Then he leaned back in and hung up the mike. He shut the car door, adjusted his belt with his pistol and other cop equipment on it, and followed Denise out of sight toward the front veranda. He wasn’t wearing a hat. He was going bald—a tonsure of pale skin showing on top.
“Action central,” Morgan said. “The bitch has brought in reinforcements. Stay here. I’ll deal with this.” Amanda followed Morgan as far as the top of the stairs, so that she could watch and listen. “Hello, Dave. What’s up?” Morgan asked as she went down the stairs.
“I’d like to speak to the owner of the black Lexus parked outside, ma’am.”
“He’s in her room,” Denise said.
“What seems to be the problem?” Morgan acted as if Denise wasn’t there.
“There has been a complaint, ma’am. I need to talk with him.”
“He’s resting right now. He suffered a rather nasty blow to his head the other day and is recuperating. Can’t I help?”
“Don’t trust her,” Denise said.
“I don’t think so, ma’am. If you’ll just wake him up. I’ll have to take him in for some questioning.”
“Why are you dealing with her? Just go get him.” Denise pushed the officer’s arm, which, Amanda noted, he did not appreciate. Amanda had always had a soft spot for men in uniform. Not that uniforms were sexy or anything—they weren’t—but a sort of sympathy for a man who would put one on and go out into the public. Uniforms and heroes went together. Without his uniform that man down there would be no one at all—just a slight, pale, balding, not quite so young man standing in the hallway. With his uniform he was the polished focal point of all attention and the morning light. It took a certain kind of unironic man to dress up like a hero.
“What’s this all about, Dave?” Morgan asked, going down to the bottom stair. “Would you like a cup of coffee? It’s a long drive out here.”
“No, thank you, ma’am. I’ve had my coffee for the day. If you would just ask him to come down.”
“Dave, do you have a warrant or anything, a reason to be here? I mean, I’m his lawyer, I have to ask.”
“No, ma’am, no warrant,
but there has been a serious complaint.”
“I’ll get him,” Morgan said and headed back up the stairs.
The officer turned to Denise and asked, “And is the complainant here? She’ll have to come in as well.”
Morgan stopped and turned around. “And who might the complainant be?”
“Why Susan, of course, that poor traumatized thing,” Denise said. “I’ll fetch her, officer.” Denise came quickly up the stairs, brushing past Morgan and then Amanda at the top.
“And the complaint is?” Morgan asked the officer.
“Rape, ma’am.”
Morgan was silent. She nodded her head slowly. “I’ll bring him right down, Dave. I’ll be going in with you”
“We don’t give lifts to lawyers, ma’am.”
Amanda followed Denise down the hall. She stopped at one of the bedroom doors with a padlock and went to unlock it. “Don’t interfere, Amanda, or I will see that you are charged with harboring a fugitive and obstruction of justice.”
“But Susan said nothing like that happened.”
“What did you expect her to say? Poor girl, trapped here with him and no way out, no way to call for help. Why do you think she went into hiding?” Denise pulled the padlock off and went into the room, slamming the door behind her.
Morgan was knocking on the door of her room back at the head of the stairs. “That’s strange. It’s locked,” she said.
Then they heard Nemo say, “Hold on. Who is it?”
