“But Beto —” Bobbie whined.
“Listen, meantime I don’t want any more phone calls. You don’t have to cut any wires, Bobbie. Just unplug that phone.” He was staring at Dorothea with a hard, mean look. “Toss it in the arroyo.”
Bobbie did as he was bidden, leaving Dorothea alone in the kitchen with Roberto.
I wonder, she thought, how much more of this I can stand. Her body felt light and wobbly. She should eat something, and see that they all got fed, of course, the time-honored responsibility of woman. The thought of food made her stomach clench. Tell him to cook his own goddamn breakfast.
Stay your hand. Survive. What the hell use is it having a ghost take all the trouble to come and tell you how to save your life if you don’t use what he tells you? He came to you last night because you’re the one in a position to act — Ricky isn’t. Stop blaming yourself and take advantage of what you’ve got: good advice, sanction from someone who ought to know, confirmation that your instinct for personal survival is right. Don’t offer yourself. “Eggs?” she said.
Roberto shrugged.
He’s angry, she thought, because he knows I’m not going to give him a chance to “blow me away,” and he despises me for it. Well, let him. Christ, her body was sore from sleeping on the floor.
She broke eggs into a bowl. The clean, milled surfaces of the shells felt like satin to her touch. All her senses were vitalized by tension and by fear. She poured the beaten eggs into a heated pan.
“That stuff smells funny,” Blanca said. She had installed herself at the counter with a bowl of cereal and was watching Dorothea cook.
Dorothea added another dollop of soy sauce. “It’s egg foo yung, a kind of Chinese omelet,” she said.
“I don’t like Chinese food,” Blanca said, wrinkling her nose. “But Ricky might like some.”
Ricky! How had Blanca come all that way from “You’re the one that’s dying of cancer”? Dorothea said, “How is Ricky this morning?”
“I don’t know, exactly. Last night he couldn’t sleep, and I was wide-awake myself, so we sort of talked most of the night — until Bobbie came around playing big-shot and made me go back to my own room. Ricky seemed pretty good when I left him.”
God, what wouldn’t Dorothea give right now to have the whole damned lot of them vanish like smoke so that she could crawl into Ricky’s bed, twine herself around his scarecrow limbs, press against his knobby crate of a chest, and lull herself to sleep with the dogged rhythm of his heart.
“Is that stuff done?” Blanca said. “I’ll take him some.”
She had clearly taken pains to brush her thick hair and wash up, though her blouse had a drip-spot on it and the ironed-in crease was gone from her jeans. Her face seemed slightly puffy, accentuating the sensuous quality of the golden-skinned face, the luminous sweep of the brow under the thick, weighty hair. The sockets of her eyes looked bruised, apparently from lack of sleep as well as the effects of her asthma attack the evening before.
Bobbie came trailing in. “Nobody around,” he said. “But they’ll come sometime. We got to go, Beto.”
“We should eat first,” Blanca said primly, tasting what Dorothea had spooned onto her plate.
“You’re not going anywhere, don’t worry,” Roberto said to her.
“I’m going with you,” she said.
“Hell you are.”
“Beto!” she wailed.
“I can’t have you getting sick. Give me some breakfast.”
“I won’t be sick.” Blanca held out a plate and Dorothea filled it. The girl gave the plate to Roberto. “I’m fine this morning. It was only the dogs’ hair anyhow, and when we’re out of here, that won’t be a problem any more. Come on, Roberto. I’m coming with you.”
“No,” Roberto said, with his mouth full.
“Bobbie’s going, and he’s only your cousin!”
“I have to,” Bobbie mumbled wretchedly.
“You?” Blanca cried, outraged, turning on Bobbie. “You shouldn’t even be here! It was all my idea, not yours!”
“Take that guy his breakfast,” Roberto said. “Nobody’s going anywhere yet.”
Blanca slipped off the stool and went to her brother. “Okay, but don’t you try to sneak away without me, Beto. I won’t let you. I’ll make a lot of trouble.”
He reached out and grabbed her good arm and shook her. Her hair bounced, her jaw dropped, her plaster-cased arm jigged briefly in the air as if she were dancing. She was clearly too startled to utter a sound.
Roberto said, “No more trouble, Quita. Not from you, not from nobody. Now, go on.”
And she went.
Sarah, the taller of the Twinkies, came red-faced to Ellie and whispered, “Miss Stern, what am I going to do? I’ve got my period.”
Damn. “You don’t have anything with you?”
“No. I’m early by a couple of days, and I didn’t expect to be away overnight.” Her lips quivered.
“Go use some toilet paper from the bathroom.” Thank God somebody had thought to ask for a fresh supply last night. “Or better yet, there’s a roll of paper towels in there now. Use some of that.”
Sarah stood there. “Yeah, we thought of that, Cindy and me, but I thought maybe you might have a Tampax with you?”
“I’m sorry, Sarah, I don’t.”
The girl nodded and headed for the bathroom.
Ellie climbed stiffly to her feet. “All right, everybody,” she said. “Let’s try to clean ourselves up a little. We’re not animals, even if we get treated as if we were.”
Mechanical speech, mechanical action, she thought, as they straggled into a line for the use of the bathroom. You go through the motions to fill the time.
She remembered last night’s vision of her butterfly visit, and she had the curious sensation that today she was living in some sort of obverse of that vision: the mechanical opposed to the spontaneous, the drearily horrible set against the vividly wonderful. And this misery could no more be fully described afterward — if there were to be an afterward — than that joy could be.
“Aren’t they going to feed us breakfast?” somebody whined.
Click , went something (she imagined) inside her, and she told them in falsely confident tones that of course they would be fed. Meantime, she had them take some of Dorothea’s pictures out of the racks to look at. The kids responded sluggishly at first, but they did as they were told.
The idea of invading Dorothea’s privacy in her absence filled Ellie with mean pleasure. She was so nasty with me last night, she thought, and it wasn’t fair. I was right. She could save us, she should save us. She’s had a whole life already, more than a lot of people get.
Her thoughts, panicky and childish, revolted her. You’re a teacher, she told herself angrily. So teach!
“All right,” she said, “let’s leave the pictures for a while, and after we all have breakfast maybe Ms. Howard will talk with us about her work. Meantime, we’ll do some drawing of our own. Pull out those newsprint pads and pass around some charcoal from that tin over there. Come on, Ms. Howard won’t mind. Spread out, give each other some room. The light’s good and there’s lots to see out of these great big windows. Or draw each other, if you can stand to.”
That got a giggle. She felt a rush of warmth for them, and then a spasm of rage on their behalf. Would any of them ever again look at a painting without feeling echoes of this time? Would they ever think of an artist without thinking of Dorothea — prisoner in her own home, powerless against armed criminals? What a lesson!
Ellie drew the sink in the corner, ignoring the hungry hollowness in her belly.
Someone tapped on the glass.
Everyone stared.
A man stood outside, a tall man with bushy hair and a push-broom mustache. He had a roll of papers in one hand. He wore a corduroy suit and a bolo tie and dusty boots. The fingers that drummed the glass were big and square-ended.
Scrambling to her feet, Ellie went to the window.
He mouthed a word at her: Dorothea, of course. He was looking for Dorothea. He knew nothing. She must do it all. Her heart’s thunder filled her mind.
The kids crouched wordless on the floor with their sheets of paper while she searched for a catch to open one of the windows. The catches were recessed, hidden in the frames. She found one, but it stuck. She struggled with it two-handed, trying to get a grip with too many fingers on too small a flange of metal, while the man shouted idiotically through the glass, a far-off voice like a voice in a dream that she couldn’t understand.
Jeff tried to help her dislodge the catch.
Joyce rushed up, a piece of paper in her hands. It had writing on it. She pressed the paper to the glass.
The man turned his head; waved to someone else they couldn’t see; gave them all a quick grin (don’t worry, here she is, thanks all the same) and strode away toward the corner of the building without looking back. Ellie saw him flourish the papers he carried, saluting, she supposed, Dorothea.
He had not seen the written words, that was sure: HELP WE ARE BEING HELD HOSTIGE.
“I didn’t write it dark enough,” Joyce said in a small, desperate voice. “I should have written in charcoal, but I had this pencil in my hand.”
Jeff hit the glass with his fist and sobbed out a string of obscenities. He moaned, “We should have shouted. He’d have heard something. Why didn’t we just yell?”
From the other side of the room, Alex said, “The Cantus could have heard you, too. They’d have come in here shooting, man.” He looked at the sheet of paper dangling from Joyce’s hand. “When they see that maybe they’ll shoot anyhow.”
One of the Twinkies began to cry. “Shut up,” whispered the other one, hugging her. “Shut up, Cindy, shut up!”
“What’s going to happen?” Cindy sobbed. “Why are they going to shoot us?”
“Shhh, shut up, come on,” Sarah said tenderly.
Ellie stood by the windows, straining to see if the man outside might possibly come back this way. No, of course he wouldn’t.
My God, she thought, we lost our chance. Why do these kids listen to me at all, why should anyone listen to me? She caught Alex watching her with a look of bitter satisfaction that made her want to smack his face. She would have, by God she would have, except she was afraid that once she starting hitting him she wouldn’t be able to stop.
Jeff cleared his throat. “Joyce. You could tear that paper up small and flush the pieces down the toilet inside. Give it here, I’ll do it.”
Ellie pushed past Jeff and grabbed the paper out of Joyce’s hands. “I’ll take care of it.”
Miraculously, she did. She put the paper on the floor and began drawing on it with big, black strokes of the charcoal. She drew the dog Mars, his corpse sprawled so that the body and limbs covered the incriminating words Joyce had written; she drew him as she had seen him lying on the hillside after that thunderclap of a shot.
Here came George, wheeling from the studio windows when he saw Dorothea. This is it, she thought, conscious of the absurdity of it. A line from a hundred bad movies: this is it. She smoothed down the apron she had thrown on to cook breakfast in.
Be careful, be safe, the judge told you. Remember.
Behind her, at the window and the front door, the two Cantu boys had their guns ready, their fear ready. She stayed at the corner of the house so they could see her, so they wouldn’t panic at losing sight of her. Let George come to her, he’d shown himself willing to do that often enough.
He did, cheerful as ever. He’d brought copies of the poster for the concerts with her drawing on it. He didn’t ask why she looked disheveled, why her hands trembled, why there were people locked up in her studio. He apparently saw nothing.
The trick now would be to edge him into his car again and away. Thank God he was biddable. She could easily draw him back around to the front of the house just by drifting in that direction herself.
Isn’t it amazing, she thought, I see not only what’s around me but something that isn’t, really — a ghost — and George sees nothing of what’s right in front of his eyes.
Her resolve wavered. He was so close, so damned stupidly oblivious. She wanted to tell him right out. He was a man of the world, or so he thought, a man who wanted to be the mediator between herself and the commercial parts of that world. Let him mediate this, by God! But he wouldn’t. This was George. He would only find some way to make things worse.
She imagined Roberto’s heavy, angry face peering at her over the shotgun barrel. You’ve had your chance for heroics, she told herself, and you decided. Just do what they told you to do. It’s all you’re capable of anyway.
“Handsome job,” she said, glancing at the poster with a professional eye as she dawdled around the corner of the house, George bouncing along beside her. The reproduction really was pretty good.
“Just handsome?” he expostulated. He was practically dancing. “It’s beautiful! I was pretty relieved, to tell the truth. You know what a mess they made of the flyers for the craft show last fall. But this — I sat down with them and made them understand we wanted a first-class job, and that’s what we’ve got. I’m proud to show it to you.”
They were standing close to the portal. She would have to come up with some excuse for not inviting him inside.
She glanced over her shoulder at the front door, which stood slightly open. “Look, George, I have this class of kids visiting today —”
“Oh yeah,” he said, “that must be their van. I wondered who that bunch was. Pretty small class; lucky for you.”
“You saw them?” she stammered.
“Sure, in the studio. They were all drawing away like mad, very earnest-looking.”
“Oh, they’re a very earnest group,” she said inanely. “I’d ask you in for a bite to eat, but they’ve gone through the place like locusts. I’d forgotten about teen-age appetites.”
“Dear Dorothea,” cried George, flinging up his arms with such abandon that she flinched, in a panic that the watching Cantus would take this for a sign of comprehension or a signal to an army of cops in the hills —
All that happened was that George leaned down and embraced her. “It’s me that owes you hospitality! Sometime soon we are going to have an historic meal, I don’t know what —” He stood back, holding her shoulders and smiling down at her. “Maybe I’ll hire the Trujillo boys to do a real old-style barbecue in the backyard, and we’ll have some people in to share it.
“Actually, it would be a shame to pass up the chance to do some fund-raising for the concerts at the same time, wouldn’t it? If we could just have the barbecue in a place that was big enough —”
Shit, she thought, George wants me to let him and Leroy Trujillo run the whole thing here.
“But of course I realize, your privacy is important to you,” he added quickly with an ingratiating smile. “I wouldn’t dream of imposing on you.”
I have just the site for your party, George. We’ll put up a tent and have an unveiling, a surprise for you. Isn’t a wall covered with a work of art a passable symbol for oppression transcended? But I can’t promise anybody anything this morning, so you must be content with something else from me now: your life, George. Let me give you your life.
She put her arm through his and turned him toward his car. Nice to be able to do something for somebody, even if it’s only George. “I have to get back to my guests. I promised them a critique of their work.”
“What, food and a critique too? I hope they’re paying you for this, Dorothea.”
Steered to the car by her, he sat sideways in the front seat while the air conditioner blew out the sun-heated inside. He talked about publicity. He interrupted himself with a happy laugh and leaned out of the car to greet Brillo, who came rushing up to lick George’s face.
Dorothea froze. Christ almighty. Surely, without doubt, from where he sat George could see Mars lying black and bloated on the hillside behind the house!
“Down you go,
boy,” George said, giving Brillo a solid but friendly shove. Dorothea caught hold of the gray dog’s collar and held him by her side. George pulled the door shut. “Okay, Dorothea. You take care of yourself. I don’t like to see you looking so tired.”
The car revved and pulled away in a spit of gravel. Brillo lurched suddenly forward, pulling his collar from her grasp. He went galloping after the car, a thing he hadn’t done since he was a pup. Dorothea yelled after him, but he vanished around the first of the driveway’s curves. Just as well, really: best of all if he were to follow George all the way back to town, out of danger, but that was too much to hope for.
She felt dizzy with strain. She turned.
There was Mars’s body, an odd-shaped splotch on the dun-colored slope, legs stiffly outhrust. Could George have taken him for a shadow?
Here came Roberto, running toward her with the pistol in his hand. He looked where she was looking, and she heard him curse under his breath.
“I don’t think George noticed,” she said hastily. “He’s not the kind of a man who notices things.”
Roberto prodded her with the pistol, clearly unwilling to touch her. I didn’t say anything, she thought over and over. I didn’t do anything. Don’t kill me. You can’t kill me, I had this special advice and I followed it. I was careful; I said nothing.
Blanca pushed past Bobbie at the door. “It wasn’t somebody from the hospice, was it?” she asked.
Dorothea shook her head.
Roberto slammed the front door shut behind them all and set his back against it. “God damn you, you old bruja,” he snarled. “You told him, didn’t you? You sent him for help. I saw how he drove out of here — tore down the drive like a bat out of hell, man.”
“She wouldn’t do that,” Bobbie said. “Too many people could get hurt.” He gave Dorothea a look that seemed close to tears.
“When he hugged her,” Roberto insisted, “she whispered something to him.”
“Jesus,” Bobbie said weakly. “We really got to get out of here now.”
Dorothea thought, he’ll take Joyce. He’ll take a pretty girl, not a dried-up, shaking, safe old woman.
Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books) Page 23
