by John Enright
“No, don’t,” Emma said, pulling his hand down. “Let’s go.”
“But I’m supposed to meet Starks here.”
“Yes, I know. Starks expects to meet both of us here, the two people left that the feds haven’t questioned, the two most likely suspects left. Well, fuck them. I don’t trust Starks, and I don’t want to talk to the feds.”
“Finish up then, and we’ll go. Though I think you are being more than a tad paranoid. Starks?”
“Just a feeling. The questions he asked. He seemed to know things he shouldn’t have known. Listen, Nickel, the feds went to my family looking for me. That wasn’t good. It spooked my dad and the other elders. They are trying to come across squeaky clean to get the okay for their casino, and the feds are investigating one of their chiefs? They threw me out, disowned me. They had to. I have no place to go. I thought I might hide out with you for the time being till this sorts out.” Emma still had hold of his hand, the one she had pulled down from motioning the waitress. “There is more, but not here. Let’s go before Starks and whoever he is bringing with him arrives.”
Dominick got up to collect his things and put on this coat. “What time is it?” he asked. Emma pulled out a cell phone and told him. “We still have plenty of time to catch the late boat. We can eat somewhere.”
Emma was helping him on with his London Fog. “No, not the late boat. If they don’t find us here, they’ll be watching that. Can’t we catch the next one?”
“Barely,” Dominick said, cinching his coat and putting on his hat, “but we can try.”
“Different doors,” Emma said and she gave him a peck on the cheek.
Emma went out by the back door onto the alley. Dominick left through the front onto the street. The weather had worsened again. He headed straight down for the ferry dock. No one was following him The legs of his best pants were getting soaked. What a miserable place to live.
Only because the ferry was delayed by the weather did they make it, Emma four or five people ahead of him in the line. On board they ignored each other, and disembarking Dominick lost sight of her entirely. Alone he walked to where he had parked the MGA and started it up, but two minutes behind him Emma arrived and lowered herself into the passenger-side seat. “Lord Witherspoon,” she said.
“Queen Emma,” he answered.
Chapter 18
It really took less than a day, but Dominick let it go on because he didn’t know how to end it. If he had had a chance to turn it down out front, he would have. Oh, the sex was alright the first night, but in a well-heated house he didn’t need a bedmate. Some part of Emma’s body was always in the way when he wanted to roll over or change positions. She seemed much larger asleep. Also she talked in her sleep—gibberish mainly but disconcerting nonetheless because he would lie awake trying to decipher what she was saying. So, it was not a good night’s sleep. Dominick was happy when Emma got out of bed sometime after the sun came up and he could stretch out in his full bed with all the pillows.
But he didn’t get to sleep much longer. No sooner had he rejoined his dream than Emma was shaking his shoulder. “Hey, sleepyhead, Nickel, wake up. What’s the secret with the TV set? I can’t get it to work. I gotta have my morning news.”
“Emma, I must warn you. I can be a very cranky person when woken up. The TV set does not work because the cable is turned off for the winter.” Dominick rolled away from her.
“What? That too?”
The night before, Emma had gone searching for a computer so that she could check her e-mail while Dominick was fixing something for a late, light supper, and he had told her that there was no computer in the house and that, in fact, the phone line was disconnected for the season. When she pulled out her cell phone instead, Dominick had to ask her to turn it off. “They can trace your calls here, at least to the neighborhood. That’s hardly hiding out. No, turn it off. You don’t need it.”
“I don’t believe this. The cable too? How do you know what’s going on?”
“I don’t. Now go away and let me sleep.”
But she wouldn’t. She wanted coffee and something for breakfast. She was jumpy and jittery, like someone going through withdrawals. His makeshift breakfast of oatmeal, toast and marmalade didn’t suit her either. She wanted eggs, but of course Dominick had no eggs. The day continued apace with its start. All of Dominick’s plusses for his hideaway—the seclusion, the silence, the freedom from electronic intrusions—were minuses for Emma. Bored to distraction, she prowled the house. By midmorning she was hitting the vodka, first with orange juice, then straight on the rocks. She spent a while in the garage, listening to the radio in Dominick’s car, but that didn’t satisfy. A car radio is not interactive. Changing the station is your only control. There was nothing to look at. She came back in to where Dominick was reading at the kitchen table and asked if he wanted to screw. She was looking for something to do. “No, thanks,” Dominick said, not just then.
She was beginning to drive him crazy. This was not working out. As a houseguest, Emma was hopeless. And now she was getting drunk, breaking the houseguest’s second commandment, thou shall not get drunk on your host’s booze. The first commandment about sleeping with your host or hostess she had already broken. He would see how long it took her to get to the third and ask him for a loan.
Dominick disliked tending to drunks, but over the years he had had to do it often enough, starting with his mother. He warmed up two cans of chunky soup for lunch and put out a plate of bread. Emma ate when the food was put in front of her. She was at the entitlement monologue stage, where the drunk seeks through the telling of self-serving anecdotes to establish his or her right to be so self-absorbed. This can be revealing in so far as what incidents of camouflage are chosen. The drunk dresses herself in pieces of her past, laced together with lies of omission. Emma’s costume was a typically charming one. The illegitimate daughter of an unemployed chief, she had been farmed out as a child to a Puerto Rican family in the Bronx. Spanish, in fact, was her first language. “I still dream in Spanish,” she said. Only after her father’s wife died did he admit his paternity and bring her back to the reservation.
There was more. Dominick got up and cleared the table. Emma poured herself another three fingers of vodka on the rocks. He had learned tending drunks to never get between them and their bottle, never even think of trying to get them to stop drinking. Who was he to interfere with someone so lost in the moment? Besides, it never worked and just caused unnecessary scenes. The best you could do was feed them and not let them drive. Emma started talking about people he didn’t know as if they were all old mutual friends. She was still making sense, not slurring her words; she was just wandering around in her memory, looking for a place in her past to occupy.
Dominick put some ice cubes in a glass and joined Emma at the table. “May I?” he asked, motioning to the now half-empty fifth of his vodka.
“Let me,” Emma said, and she poured him a drink equal to her own. “You’re a nice guy, Nickel. How come I didn’t meet you years ago when I was a prize worth catching?”
“You are still a prize.” They clinked glasses. Emma smiled. She was happy. Now she had a drinking buddy. “Emma, tell me about John Starks, what that gut suspicion of yours was all about.”
“Oh, Starks. He’s a strange one, isn’t he? Little Miss Proper. I’ve known him for years from the bar. We’ve done some business now and then. He does like his recreational drugs. How did you get to know him?”
“Doesn’t matter. Your suspicion?”
“Well, when I called him to see if he knew how to reach you, he seemed awfully interested in you, had all kinds of questions about you.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Call Starks looking for me.”
“Because I’d already called Atticus looking for you, and he just said you were gone. Starks was my only other connection to you. Anyway, I guess I let it slip that Theo thought you were Lord Witherspoon.”
Emma looked down into her glass and swirled her ice cubes around. “Was that some sort of secret?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“So later he called me back, and that’s when the strange questions started. About the Bay Savers meeting and where you and I went afterwards and about why I called you Nickel. He wondered if that was some sort of code for something. I got this feeling that he was talking to someone else in addition to me? I couldn’t think fast enough to lie, so I pretended my signal was breaking up and asked him to give me a call if he heard from you. Nickel, are you sure you don’t want to go up to the bedroom and spend the rest of the afternoon making out?”
“Then he called you yesterday?”
“Yeah, he called to tell me you’d stopped by the museum and that you were going to The Harp. But he wanted to know how soon I thought I might get there to meet you, which I thought a strange question. But then everything sounds the same coming from Starks.”
“Sometimes I think irony is his only emotion.”
“I’m not going to ask twice, you know.” Emma was fading.
“I know. Go take a nap. I’ll fix something nice for dinner.”
“There is one other thing.” Emma drained her glass and pushed it away. “There is a warrant out for me, an old criminal trespass charge, tribal bullshit, that was placed in abeyance if I stayed out of trouble. Well, the feds looking for me was trouble enough to reactivate it.” Emma pushed herself up from the table. “I thought you should know that you are harboring a—what-do-you-call-it?—a fugitive.”
Dominick talked Emma into turning herself in. His plans did not feature harboring a fugitive. Her story would be that she had been out of town and hadn’t learned she was wanted for questioning. As soon as she learned, she came right in. She had done nothing wrong; she had nothing to worry about. Did the tribe have an attorney? No? Bad idea? Then she should ask Theo for one from Bay Savers if the feds tried to detain her for anything. The main thing was not to lie to them or to volunteer any information. Why had she left the Bay Savers meeting? Because the tribal elders had told her to quit and she was worried about being illegally parked. Was he really Lord Witherspoon? No, that was just an old joke as far as she knew. Did she know where he was? No. He would be leaving this place immediately, so she would not be lying.
Dominick had made pasta for dinner—marinara sauce, garlic bread, salad, a bottle of Cabernet. Emma came down from her nap subdued and returned to what was left of the bottle of vodka. Over dinner Dominick persuaded her that going back was the best thing to do. It wasn’t that hard to do. Obviously, her idea of a little outlaw idyll with Nickel was not working out. There were no electronic diversions.
Not long after dinner Emma excused herself; rather she came into the kitchen, took the now almost empty bottle of vodka, and said she was going to bed. “Listen, Nickel, is there another bed up there I can sleep in?” She was wavering a little. “If we’re through screwing I’d rather sleep alone. You either snore or toss all over the place.”
Dominick made up a bed for her in another guest bedroom.
“You’re a good host, Nickel, but I worry about your lack of sex drive.” Emma crawled under the covers with her clothes on, putting the bottle on the floor beside the bed, and went quickly to sleep.
“I haven’t worried about that in a long time,” Dominick said to himself, watching her from the doorway as she passed out. Asleep, Emma’s relaxed face looked years younger, as if relieved of the need to pretend she was someone she wasn’t, some hard-nosed adult, and could for a while be the face of the child she really was.
In the morning, on the drive to the ferry, Emma hit him up for a loan. They were in the MGA. Dominick told her he would drop her off for the midmorning boat so that she could get back, but that he would have to return and close up the house before he could leave. She asked him when she could turn her phone back on, and he told her when she got off the boat back in New Jerusalem. Then she asked if he could spare her a hundred bucks. She would get it back to him later. He had to stop at an ATM to replenish his cash.
At the ferry dock, before getting out of the car, Emma leaned over and gave him a hug and a smooch on the lips. “You’re sweet, Nickel, boring but sweet. You’d make some girl a wonderful brother.”
Emma could have asked but never did, why, if her turning herself in for questioning was such a good idea, it would not also be a good idea for Dominick to do so too. Well, for one thing there were no outstanding warrants on him, and for another he had never been properly asked. They were looking for him? So, find him. If they were at all interested, they could check his credit cards. He had taken $800 out of the local island ATM in a little more than a week. In any event, if they did catch up with him, his answer would be how was he supposed to know they were looking for him? He had lied to Emma. He wasn’t going south. He would hang out at Brenda and Charlie’s for the time being.
As Dominick drove away, he mulled over Emma’s accusation about his lack of sex drive. It probably wasn’t what it once was, but then he had always suspected it wasn’t what it was supposed to be. That was another one of those purportedly universal endorphin/dopamine-driven givens. This one was shared with every other sentient species—the essential passion to reproduce. The ejaculative imperative. Well, he had not reproduced. He had never felt the slightest inkling to do so. Oh, he had always enjoyed having sex, but it had never been all that important to him. He liked women well enough and found some more attractive than others, but the attraction was more aesthetic than reproductive. Certain rare women were works of art, a pleasure to behold and be with, but who wanted to screw a work of art?
So, Emma had been miffed by Dominick’s declining her offered re-engagement and accused him of being abnormal. Perhaps he was. What was normal? “Normal.” Dominick laughed, remembering a flight attendant’s pre-takeoff spiel on a flight he had taken years before, a commuter flight filled with harried businessmen. She had started by saying, “Please pretend to pay attention,” and he had looked up from his magazine, attracted already. She delivered the requisite set of instructions to her veteran passengers, all of whom had already heard it more times than the average cop-show viewer has heard the Miranda Rights read to captured perps. She did it as fast as possible, like some sort of robotic sorcerer’s apprentice, with her own revisions and inclusions. She was a well-practiced comedienne. She was also a classic American woman—tall, trim, well kept, middle-aged, ironic. When she got to the part about the descending oxygen masks and how to put them on and how the balloon would not expand and about breathing normally, she said, “If you can’t breathe normally, breathe the way you normally breathe.” Dominick wouldn’t have minded having a drink and a chat with her after the flight. Not because he wanted her to have his children, but because he liked the way she thought. Normalcy was such an assumption.
Dominick had never thought to ask if Emma was married or not. Probably not—no ring, no mention, no worries about hubby or kids left alone. He couldn’t see her as a wife-type or mother. Of course, if her childhood had been as she described it, she had not had much of a model for a typical—or was it a normal?—domestic life. Maybe they would meet up again. Maybe he would get his hundred bucks back. There was certainly one link between them—the fact that they had both grown up as bastards exiled from their fathers’ worlds. Who knew what else they shared? Both unwed, no progeny. Was her escape into casual sex the same as his fleeing it? The same reason anyway—the recognition of its meaninglessness? Her lineage’s claim to fame was a bastard Mather; his was a bastard Washington. You might say illegitimacy ran in their families. Was there an organization for people like them, like the DAR? The Bastard Offspring of Famous Americans, BOFA. Like all the descendants of Sally Hemings or West Ford.
Sally Hemings, of course, was Thomas Jefferson’s slave mistress, his dead wife’s half-caste half sister who bore him a half dozen children. West Ford was Washington’s purported mulatto son, whose mother was also a family slave with the wonderfu
l name of Venus Ford. Because of Dominick’s great-aunt Dorothea’s claim to First Father descendancy, Dominick had done the research. Washington had had no legitimate children of his own, a fact that Dominick had found strangely gratifying. Washington had married a widow with two children, and we always think of Martha as a gray-haired old lady, but when they wed she was, at twenty-seven, only a year older than the future general, and her children were still toddlers. Did George, too, see the reproductive thing as more trouble than it was worth—except for his slip up with Venus? The sole progeny of the father of our country had been born a slave. Obviously, Dominick’s great-aunt Dorothea must have had some other illegitimate child in mind. There were no Fords in their family tree.
It was several days before Dominick got back to the village on errands—the usual rounds, including the library. He was running out of things to read. He had a list of New England history books he wanted to see, but he had to sign up for a library card first. While he was there he used one of their online computers to check his e-mail. There was something from Angelica: “In light of my father’s arrest—see attached—I think we should talk. Please e-mail me back or give me a call. I am confused. Where are you? Is there another Lord Witherspoon or is someone impersonating you? I must clear my father of any charges or we may lose the house as gov’t now can seize property involved with federal crimes. Please get back to me. I am desperate.”
The attachment was a Boston Globe article from a few days before, “Feds ID Old Grofton Bomber”:
Federal authorities yesterday announced that they had identified a prime suspect in the bombings of the Hercules Corp liquid natural gas terminal site in Old Grofton. Working with British intelligence agencies, the FBI has determined that the suspect is a known international anarchist already wanted in England, Ireland and Italy for terroristic anti-government activities.
The suspect, previously known to authorities here as Lord Witherspoon, is a British subject. He was connected to the Old Grofton bombings through surveillance photos and fingerprints found inside an undetonated explosive device found at the scene of the first attack. The suspect is still at large and his whereabouts is unknown.
