South by Southeast

by Blair Underwood

  “That’s not true. Don’t believe that for a minute.”

  “Every new guy I meet, I’ll be afraid he’ll find out.”

  “April knows about me,” I said. “She knows about Mother. All of it.”

  Chela’s sobs went silent as she gazed up at me, her nose red. “Really?”

  “From day one,” I said. “A cop source told her. Trying to scare her off. It didn’t work.”

  As soon as I said it, I realized April wasn’t a good example of hope.

  “Is that why she dumped you?” Chela said.

  My throat tightened as I shook my head. Yes, a voice whispered. “No,” I said. “She was ready to be married, and I wasn’t. She wasn’t rejecting who I was—it’s who I am.”

  “Maybe we’re always the same person,” Chela said. “Deep down. Like you said.”

  “That’s not exactly it,” I said, wishing I’d chosen my words more carefully on the balcony. “The more we can look at where we’ve been . . . it’s easier to stay on the path to where we’re going.”

  I was talking to myself as much as Chela. Hell, I needed to write that down.

  “I want what you had,” Chela said. “Somebody I can tell. Should I tell B?”

  I sighed, stroking the tangles out of Chela’s hair. Bernard Faison, Chess Genius, didn’t seem a likely candidate for a cold dose of History 101.

  “It’s beautiful that you want to tell him,” I said. “And maybe you will, one day. But B’s just a kid, Chela. Two parents. Million-dollar house in the Valley. There’s no way he could see where you came from. I’ll be the one you can say anything to. Deal?”

  In Chela’s silence, she didn’t seem satisfied. I could almost hear April’s voice warning me not to try to be a substitute for a man in Chela’s life, even if I was only trying to protect her. April never forgot that Chela had tried to climb into bed with me the first time I brought her to my house. That was all she’d known. Instinct made me stop stroking Chela’s hair.

  “If it’s right to tell Bernard, you’ll know,” I said. “Only you. I can’t tell you when.”

  “I will,” she said, her voice brightening. “I want to. As soon as I get back.”

  Good luck with that, kid, I thought. Disaster might be on Chela’s horizon, but how could I blame her for wanting someone who could accept her blemishes? The truth is powerful enough to change everything, and nothing is harder than change.

  I just hoped Chela would be ready.

  I woke up in a cold sweat that night, but it had nothing to do with Chela.

  The dream was so vivid that I checked my face and skin for wounds. I’d been fighting for my life. I could almost smell Spider’s cigarette smoke and adrenalized sweat in my room.

  My nightmare gallery has a colorful cast of characters. Sometimes it was the corrupt LAPD cops who nearly killed Chela and tried to end my life in the desert. Or the bear of a man I wrestled in the Florida swamp. More and more, Dad showed up in my dreams: a husk confined to a hospital bed in the nursing home he had been lucky to escape.

  In Miami, my dreams were about Spider. I only met Spider a couple of times, but I might have known him better than anyone. He was a South African drummer extraordinaire, and the fiercest knife fighter I’d ever seen. We weren’t on good terms the last time we met, which is a kind of tragedy; under different circumstances, I would have liked to share a beer with Spider. Sweated together with him in a dojo. Instead, I’d had to kill him.

  Maybe the dreams of Spider came back to ask me if the right man had been left standing. He was the better fighter; I was just nastier. I had justice on my side, but I’m the last person who could define that word.

  I wasn’t due on the set until noon, so I’d planned to sleep in like Chela; but my dream woke me before daylight. I’d lost interest in sleeping, so I threw on some sweatpants and went to the kitchenette to fix the morning’s first coffee.

  Dad had beaten me there, with the pot already brewing and the news playing low on the living-room TV. CNN was Dad’s true religion. Dad had always been an early riser, but five thirty was pushing it even for him. He was in the hotel’s terry cloth robe he wore most of the day when he wasn’t going out. He grunted a greeting, and I grunted back. While he pulled out a coffee mug for me, I checked the mini-fridge to see if we had any eggs left. Dad and I might not talk much, but we liked to cook together. We hadn’t had many chances since Marcela moved in.

  As I studied Dad’s profile, I noticed that his cheeks had hollowed in the past year. Even while he’d taught himself to walk and speak again, time was a thief. I knew exactly how he would look in his casket.

  “What?” Dad said.

  I shrugged. “Life,” I said, although I was thinking about just the opposite.

  Dad nodded. “I . . . thank the Lord every time I open my eyes.”

  I dumped three sugars into my coffee and so much milk that it turned cold. I wondered what it felt like to know, really know, that the next five years, or two years, aren’t promised to you. I’d had that realization when I fought Spider and expected to die at his hands. But if I lived long enough, what kind of old man would I be?

  “Never told you . . .” Dad began. “Saw Shapiro before I left.”

  Dr. Joel Shapiro was Dad’s cardiologist, an office I’d visited often. Shapiro’s name made my heart skip. Dad would have reported good news right away.

  Dad’s pause was endless, so I prodded. “And?”

  He shrugged and did something rare: he looked me dead in the eye. “And whatchu think? Bad heart’s a bad heart. He says . . . I need surgery.”

  The kitchen’s fluorescent light seemed to dim. Suddenly, I wanted to go back to bed. The last time Dad was in a hospital was because he’d suffered chest pains after helping me investigate a case, and we’d both breathed a sigh of relief when the doctors sent him home.

  “What kind of surgery?”

  “Don’t matter, Ten. Won’t do it. Chances are fifty-fifty for . . . complications. We don’t think it’s worth it.”

  “Marcela knows? Since when?”

  “She was there.”

  I wanted to escape back to my dream with Spider. Marcela had accepted Dad’s proposal at the party even knowing about his bad prognosis? Marcela was an RN, so a cardiologist probably couldn’t tell her anything she hadn’t guessed. Why had he waited so long to tell me?

  “What does it mean if you don’t get the surgery?” I said.

  Instead of answering, he looked at me as if I were a toddler. Dumb question.

  “Well . . . what do we do?” I said.

  Dad shook his head. “What do we do? Eat. Sleep. Wake up. What we always do.”

  I didn’t feel anything, just as I hadn’t when I’d felt Spider’s neck break. The past year had flown by, as would the next. And the next, and the one after that, until one day a doctor with sad eyes would say to me what one had said to Dad.

  My coffee tasted like milky chalk, so I put the mug down. “Shit.”

  Dad patted my back. “Is what it is,” he said. “Least . . . you gave me a grandchild.” He smiled for the first time all morning. Thoughts of Chela always had that effect on him.

  I chuckled. “Never saw that one coming, did you?”

  “Damn right.”

  We laughed, but the laughter didn’t last. I remembered breakfast and found a pan to cook the eggs. I didn’t have an appetite, but I needed the ritual.

  “You did . . . good with that girl, Ten. Real good. That was God’s work. We started rough, but . . . glad to see how you turned out.”

  I wanted to reject the admiration in his voice. “If you say so.”

  April was on the tip of my tongue. Maybe his, too. But neither of us spoke her name.

  “Why you up so early?” Dad said.

  “Bad dreams. Spider.”

  Dad sighed, nodding. I’d told him all about my encounter with the knife man in graphic detail, as if it were an action scene from some damn movie.

  “Not surprised,” Dad sa
id.

  “Hell, that was a long time ago. Didn’t bother me before.”

  “Dead’s dead forever,” Dad said. “He’ll stay with you. Sneak up . . . on you.”

  I felt a surge of anger, remembering. “The bastard had it coming. I’d do it again.”

  “Sure,” Dad said. “Don’t mean . . . you don’t wish it hadn’t come to that.”

  I’d expected to be arrested. To see my name in the headlines as a killer. But my Double-O-Marsha had wiped Spider away as if he’d never existed, and no one knew my sins but me and Dad. Nothing about it seemed right.

  “Ten, you ’member me tellin’ you ’bout back when . . . I was in patrol? That crash?”

  I’d expected a Vietnam story, but Dad rarely talked about the war. This was a cop story Dad had shared with me only in the past three years, since he left the nursing home. He’d been alone in his patrol car, on his way home, when he’d seen a Buick weaving in and out of the lanes, the driver drunk or high. He’d flipped on his flashers to pull the car over, but the driver had panicked and sped away. Bad move.

  “That drunk who wrapped himself around a pole off La Cienega?” I said. “I remember.”

  “More to it,” Dad said. He handed me a can of nonstick cooking spray, and I greased the pan. He waited a moment, and I realized that Dad’s clipped words and growing pauses were allowing him catch his breath. Dad went on. “See . . . he was headed for that intersection . . . no sign of slowing. I knew . . . he was gonna plow over someone, or broadside ’em. He didn’t care. Wasn’t just . . . running. He was . . . ready. Didn’t care who else he took with him.”

  Dad took a breath. “You don’t have time . . . to think. You just are . . . who you are. So I sped up . . . saw the pole. Saw my chance.” Dad gestured with his hands, a sharply turning steering wheel. He had deliberately side-swiped the driver into a pole. “I . . . coulda died, too. But only one of us did.”

  He’d never told me that part of the story.

  “What’d your bosses say?”

  Dad shrugged. “Went through the motions. Then it was over. I was promoted.”

  I wanted Dad’s story to solve my uneasiness after dreaming about Spider, but it didn’t.

  “Like you always say, Dad, you reap what you sow.”

  “One thing . . . kept bothering me,” Dad said. “Why? Why not stop and take the ticket? Turned out . . .”

  “He was a fugitive,” I finished, guessing.

  Dad nodded. “Warrants on a double. Would’ve got the gas. Life at least.”

  “So it was suicide by cop instead.”

  “He chose . . . his time and place.” Dad sounded as if he respected the notion.

  A long silence followed, and I wanted it to last. I already knew I wasn’t going to like anything either of us might say next.

  “We’re . . . selfish,” Dad said. “When people die . . . we really don’t think about them. It’s only about us. Makes death real. Too real. Death . . . might let you wander away. But never far. Never . . . long.”

  My heart sped as I cracked the eggs and heard the sizzle. I’d planned to scramble them, but I’d forgotten to get a spoon.

  “My whole adult life . . . only three things mattered,” Dad said, and I noticed he had slipped into past tense. “God first. You know that. My . . . family. And . . . my work. Maybe not even . . . in that order. Trying to fix the world . . . make it right.”

  “That’s a big job.”

  Dad nodded. “It’s God’s charge to us. And when I can’t work . . . at least there’s family. Sometimes that’s enough. But when I was in that place . . . staring at those walls . . .” He shook his head. He didn’t have to finish. I’d hated putting Dad in a nursing facility, but I hadn’t had a choice. Even with a full-time staff to treat him, he’d developed a bedsore on his lower back like a winking, weeping eye. It had healed, but I’d never seen a wound yawn open that way in anyone’s flesh. A horror.

  “You won’t go to a place like that again,” I said. “You’ll be at home.”

  Dad shook his head. “Same thing, Ten. Doing . . . nothing. Being . . . no one. Can’t do that again. If it comes to that . . .”

  I needed a spatula to make some kind of effort with the eggs, but I didn’t move to get one. Breakfast was burning.

  “I get it, Dad,” I said. “No machines. No feeding tube.” We might have been discussing the day’s weather forecast. Next subject, please.

  “Not just that, Ten,” Dad said.

  I prayed that my father wasn’t about to ask me to shoot him before he got sick again.

  “Then what?” I said.

  Dad fell silent, deep in thought. He patted my back again. “You’ll know,” he said.

  “Maybe it won’t be like you think,” I said. “You might just fall asleep one night.”

  “Maybe,” Dad said. “Or I’d want to be doing something that mattered. Making the world right. God’s work.”

  Once April had accused me of riding the chaos. I’d inherited the urge honestly.

  I nodded. “Me, too.”

  Dad reached for his cane. He’d been leaning on the countertop, but he used his cane to turn around and walk away. “Better flip those eggs . . . ’fore they turn brown.”

  “Yessir.”

  Halfway to the living room, Dad stopped and turned. “Free tomorrow? ’Bout noon?”

  “I think so. Why?”

  “Was talking . . . to Marcela last night. We’re goin’ to the courthouse today, sign the papers and whatnot. Decided not to wait. Tomorrow, we’re getting married.”

  I WAS ON the phone with April at ten thirty telling her about the wedding when Chela burst into my room without knocking.

  The frantic look on her face scared me. When I’d seen her only fifteen minutes earlier, she’d listened to Dad’s news with dreamy teenage bliss.

  “What is it?” April’s voice said in my ear.

  “I’ll call you back,” I said. “Chela just came into my room.”

  April gave a short, hot sigh. Our relationship had been dancing around Chela from the beginning, with Chela trying to block her at every turn. “Ten, you need to teach her boundaries.”

  “I know. I will,” I said, my familiar promise. Wishful thinking. I hung up.

  Chela held her iPhone out toward me, and I noticed her hand trembling. “Maria’s missing,” she said.

  “Who?”

  After Dad’s talk, I had forgotten who Maria was.

  “My friend!” Chela said. “I just got a call from a girl I met at the club. They found Maria’s purse and her phone. I was one of the last numbers on her phone, so a girl with a voice like a mouse called me to ask if I know where Maria is. They have her picture of her daughter.”

  I stared at Chela blankly. “Maybe . . . she dropped her purse?”

  “That’s not like her,” Chela said, certain. “Maria is too together for that. She wouldn’t drop her purse.”

  “Everybody makes mistakes.”

  Like me, letting you go to that damn club with her. People like Maria are present even when they’re gone. My covert lady friend was like that, and there is no such thing as an easy escape. I wondered if I had underestimated Maria; she might have orchestrated her “lost purse” to keep her hooks in Chela. Good one. My own Lady M could do no better.

  “Take a deep breath,” I said. “Why are you so worried?”

  Chela pursed her lips and glanced behind her, closing my room door. Her face looked gray. “I didn’t tell you everything the other night,” she said, and cold foreknowledge stole over me again. Of course she hadn’t told me everything. “Maria’s friends said some freak is out there killing working girls, so everyone was on the buddy system. A girl named Lupe washed up on a beach. They say she hated the water. I was supposed to be Maria’s buddy, but I left early. Nobody’s seen her since then. It’s all my fault, Ten!”

  I felt my eardrums pop, as if I were in an airplane racing to thirty thousand feet. My fist curled with anger I could direct onl
y at myself. “What are you talking about?”

  She repeated what she’d said almost word for word. The implied agreements and associations made me wonder what she’d been doing for the few hours she was gone.

  “Tell me everything,” I said. “Right now.”

  My phone vibrated as April called back, but I ignored it.

  “Nothing happened while I was there. We got the IDs and went to Phoenixx, just like I said. We danced, and this guy Raphael bought us drinks. He tried to play me, but I blew him off. That’s when I decided to leave. But Maria’s friends told me about this killer guy. They were all freaked out about this dead girl. They think a murderer is out there faking drownings. I have to find Maria and make sure she’s okay.”

  Slowly, relief unclenched my fist. Chela had run into a gaggle of hookers with overactive imaginations. Someone was watching too much Dexter.

  “If they think she’s missing, they should go to the police,” I said.

  Chela planted a hand on her hip and gave me a poisonous look.

  Right.

  “What do you want from me, Chela?” I said

  “That’s the best you can do?” Chela said. “I thought you were a detective.”

  She was wrong. I’d pretended to be a detective for a while, but I’d had the urge beaten out of me. I didn’t have time to indulge panicky streetwalkers or Chela’s guilt for finding a different life. I summoned my acting abilities to assure Chela that everything was fine, that Maria’s friends were probably imagining things.

  I don’t think I calmed Chela down much, but she finally left my room.

  “Why is everything the end of the world?” April said when I finally called her back and explained that Chela had manufactured another teenage crisis.

  Why, indeed?

  The Freaknik cast and crew partied harder than any I’d ever worked with—including my costars in a Beverly Hills 90210 rip-off called Malibu High a million years ago. My costars back then had played their roles as if they were perpetually sixteen, but they were all older than twenty-one and determined to prove it. Sometimes I’d hung out with them just to get my face exposed to the hordes of paparazzi who trailed them, but bars have never been my scene. Freaknik had them beat, as if we’d gotten a memo warning us to squeeze in every ounce of living before the Zombie Apocalypse.