Late in the Standoff

by Tracy Daugherty

  “If Capriati comes in, tell him to get in touch with me. Just to talk.”

  “You could find him at the radio station.”

  “They’d let me in?”

  “It’s worth a try.”

  A young man gripping a Paco de Lucia album approached the cash register. While Marie rang up the sale, Danny turned to leave. “Danny, wait,” she said. She slipped the record into a green paper sack, wished her customer a nice day. Then she pulled Danny over, by the front counter. “What about the store?” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Anna Lia never gave me details, but I know we’ve been losing money from the start. We’ll have to go over the books—or somebody will.” She looked at the floor. “I like working here, Danny, but I know you’ve kept the place running just for her. Are you going to shut it down?”

  He stared at her and blinked several times. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t thought about it yet.”

  “I don’t want to pressure you, not now. But I’ll need to know soon what you’re planning.”

  “Right.” Why not stand here and hold her, just hold her, his hands in her hair? For all he cared, the store could burst into flames.

  “Ricky and I’ll be over at the restaurant tonight after closing, if you want to join us for drinks. Just come to the back and rap on the kitchen door,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Are you going to be okay?”

  Through the speakers, a snare drum paced out a polka beat. She touched his arm again.

  “I don’t know,” he said, then he turned and left.

  The night Anna Lia told him she loved another man, she smiled radiantly and appeared to think he’d share her joy.

  He’d been laid off by the oil company, and Simtex hadn’t hired him yet. He’d spent the day looking for work, unpacking boxes at the record store, collecting unemployment, shopping for dinner.

  “It’s good with him, Danny.”

  He was browning ground beef for enchiladas in a pan, chopping peppers, garlic, onions. He looked at her and listened, his anger, his panic, swarming like condensation blisters on the windows. Trying to control himself, he kept his movements small, considered, precise.

  “I love you, honey, but you know … our troubles in bed. With Roberto, it’s like breathing. I don’t even have to think.” She reached over, plucked a piece of onion off the stove. Grinning, she crunched it between her teeth. She’d made it clear she didn’t want to move out or cut her ties with Danny. “I just need … how do they say it here? A ‘free spirit’? I need to be a free spirit.”

  “Free spirit,” Danny repeated dully.

  “I need fulfillment with my body.” She touched his cheek. “You want me to be happy, don’t you?”

  He tipped the grease from the pan into an old coffee can over the sink, fighting to steady his wrist, to keep from scorching her face. This was so Anna Lia: restless, selfish, naive. At the same time, it was her free spirit—her enthusiasms, her sudden desires—that drew him to her so completely. She acted out what most people only thought. “What about us?” he said. The stove burners glowed a fearsome red.

  “We’ll just be us.”

  “Is this how they do it in Italy?”

  “What do you mean?” She had tied back her hair with a light blue scarf. A few curls bobbed above her eyes. She sat on a bar stool on the other side of the stove while he unwrapped a package of tortillas. He cracked the seal on a brand new bottle of vegetable oil, poured a thin coating into a fresh silver pan. Anna Lia leaned toward him. Her blouse opened loosely, just above the top button: the smooth beginnings of her breasts. “Danny?” She smiled in a way that always charmed him. Slightly crooked. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I’m not a sophisticated guy like your father, all right? Maybe it’s fine with him if your mom goes out and gets laid every night—”

  “Danny—”

  “What do you want me to say? You have my blessing? You’re my wife, goddammit.” He tossed a tortilla into the oil. It sizzled and curled. “Why are you even telling me this shit?”

  “It’s the answer to our problem,” she said, wiping her eyes.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m happy with you, Danny, really, I don’t want to change … Except … except … my body needs—”

  “Fuck you! How do you think that makes me feel? Or don’t you care?”

  “I do care. Danny, you can’t … you can’t take care of each things I need, okay? That’s not real.”

  “Oh, so you’ll line us all up. That’s real? A man for every day of the week. Like monogrammed underwear.”

  “Fuck you!” she screamed. “I love Roberto! I didn’t run looking for this. It wanted. It happened.”

  The kitchen smelled tropical and rich: chili powder, cumin, cheese. Danny just stood there until the tortilla in the pan blackened and cracked, and the smoke alarm screeched.

  Remembering that night now, he wondered again if she honestly believed—at least at the start of her affair—that she was doing their marriage a favor, taking pressure off their sex life. For all her romantic leanings, she could be coldly pragmatic—and terribly unaware of consequences. In bed, she’d never been comfortable with him, which always made him rush, just to get things over with, and afterwards they’d lie together, empty and tense.

  He never understood why the excitement that overcame him, just seeing her, dissolved so quickly as soon as their bodies touched, and he felt he must be doing something wrong. For a couple of months he’d let things drift, hoping her fling would run its course—after all, she was impulsive, impatient. Maybe then they could start over, physically, learn each other’s bodies and tastes. And damn! if the combination of her distance and flirty looks didn’t intrigue him all over again, the way it had when he’d first known her.

  As the days passed, and she became Roberto’s shadow, Danny asked Carla and Libbie if he was crazy, sticking it out, letting her get away with this. To make matters worse, his new job with Simtex had him on the road each week, giving Anna Lia plenty of time alone.

  Libbie told him what he already knew. “I’m afraid our girl is unpredictable. God love her, she can be a real pain in the ass, can’t she?”

  “Yeah. Why do you put up with her?” he’d asked Libbie.

  “She’s so lively. And she doesn’t mean any harm … even when she’s causing it,” Libbie answered.

  “I’ve never met anyone like her,” he said.

  “Too many buttoned-up Texas gals?”

  He grinned.

  “You’re a good man, Danny.”

  Carla was certain Anna Lia would crawl back to him, remorseful and repentant. “She may have left the church, but all that Catholic guilt’s got to be inside her still, just waiting to burn again. Those nuns are no slouches.”

  Carla should talk, Danny thought. He’d met her sorry boyfriend.

  The space between Anna Lia and Danny only widened; he saw her less and less. More and more, their conversations centered on the store. When she insisted on moving into her own place, Danny paid for it—how the hell else was she going to manage? Technically, she was still his wife, and Danny was no deadbeat, a word he remembered his father using with contempt.

  Eventually, of course, Roberto wanted out of the mess, and after that—Jesus—“unpredictable” didn’t begin to tell Anna Lia’s story.

  Danny took the freeway exit marked HOBBY AIRPORT, in the direction of the bookstore. Marie’s perfume lingered on his shirt.

  He’d always hated this part of the city—salesmen everywhere, just off a bus or a small jet. Spiffy suits and shoes. Often, Danny had exchanged pleasantries with them while waiting for shipments of record albums or boxes of cassette tapes. For them, Houston was just a quick stop in a long pipeline snaking toward payday. On the neighborhood’s fringes, the fly-by-nights, catering to the needs of unattached men on the run. Porno shops, massage parlors, gun stores.

  He pi
ctured his father, dragging home from a week on the road, diminished and defeated by a world like this.

  The Silencer occupied the center of a commercial strip next to a liquor store and three small pawn shops. Bars blocked the windows. A tinny bell rang when he opened the door, a quaint sound he associated with tailor shops and the yarn stores his mother used to love. The shelves were cluttered and dusty. The Big Book of Ordnance, Self Defense in the Laser Age, So You Want to Be a Mercenary? Beaming from the walls, Jesus, John Wayne, and Ronald Reagan, glossy prints above open displays of Indiana Jones bullwhips. SITUATION TARGETS—$2.00 PER SET: life-sized drawings of burglars, muggers, Vietnamese soldiers crouching in the bush. Combat assault vests (GENUINE G.I., ONE SIZE FITS ALL). A row of silver knives.

  Try as he might, Danny couldn’t see Anna Lia here. The place smelled like fireworks.

  “He’p you?” said a man with half a beard. The right side of his face, purple, slick, and elastic, had been burned. A serious old wound. He wore jeans, a big gold watch, and a T-shirt that said RECON: FIRST IN, LAST OUT.

  “Just looking,” Danny said. He didn’t know how to ask about Anna Lia without sounding like a cop. He needed a minute to pull himself together.

  “Yell if you need anything.”

  “I will, thanks.” He poked among books, army dog tags, S.S. caps. The door bell tinkled again. Soft voices, laughing, gossiping about buddies who still couldn’t get their vets’ benefits, years after the war; militia camps in the Thicket; surplus supplies; Nicaragua.

  Then: “Yeah, I heard,” the sales clerk said. “Real damn shame.”

  “Shaky,” a second man answered. “She had no fucking business.”

  Danny stiffened. He ducked around a bookcase. In a corner by a Coke machine, he pulled his shoulders to his chest and tried to make himself small. Next to him, on the wall, scribbled notes fluttered on a corkboard: “Italian Stilettos: 13 Inches Overall. Call Duffy.” “Veterans Action Group, available for rescue, property recovery, or just plain getting even. U.S. only.” “Man for hire: Sugarland area. Short term. Confidential and discreet.”

  The men were speaking rapidly now, in low tones, so Danny couldn’t hear them. He glanced around a crate of empty pop bottles. Sure enough. Smitts and his dumb-ass brother.

  There’s a smarter way to handle this, Danny told himself (Average mind, he heard his father say), even as he stepped into the open. He approached the front counter where the men had gathered. “So,” he said. Too late now. Whatever’s going to happen—boom. “How often did you force Anna Lia to come here?”

  Smitts didn’t move. He covered his surprise. He wore a faded Houston Oilers shirt. Behind him, his brother glowered, a stunned ox.

  “Neighbor,” Smitts said. “Howdy.” He grinned.

  “Answer me,” Danny said.

  “She wanted to come. The place turned her on.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Smitts rubbed his leg through heavy, stone-washed jeans. “She liked guy stuff. But then, you didn’t know that about her, did you? She never saw any guy stuff from you, ain’t that right?” His brother and the sales clerk laughed.

  Danny concentrated on the clerk’s purple patch, the smooth, ruined part of his face. It glistened in the grainy light through the window bars. Stay calm, Danny thought. Don’t let him bait you. Not here, not on his turf. “How’d you hurt your leg, Smitts? When the bomb went off? Where were you, on her patio?”

  “You know something? You’re lucky I feel sorry for you, Clark. Anna Lia liked you, god knows why, so I’ve cut you a hell of a lot of slack so far, but don’t push it, man. I busted my leg last Sunday, hunting. That’s all you need to know.”

  His brother and the man behind the counter looked hostile and amused, but for an instant, Smitts’s face seemed to soften and appeared to offer Danny a smidgen of sympathy. “Let it go, man. Stop being Sherlock Fucking Holmes—there’s nothing to find. She got a wild hair and she screwed herself up. That’s all.”

  “Did you tell her what to buy?” Danny asked.

  “I brought her here once, a long time ago, ‘cause she was into my shit, all right? I told the cops that—ask them yourself. I ain’t hiding nothing, man. Leave it alone.”

  “She wouldn’t—”

  “Yes. She would. Listen to me. You’re gonna have to deal with the fact that you didn’t know her as well as you thought you did.”

  “I was her husband, goddammit!”

  “Yeah, and I was her lover, jack. But that don’t make me an expert on why she hopped in the sack with you, or Capriati, or what the hell she was doing at three o’clock in the morning—”

  Danny shoved past him, out to his car. Christ, he wanted to smash the fucker’s face, but with three of them there, he’d never get out. Best to swallow it now. Time’ll come, he thought. Sit tight. Get strong.

  A pickup chuffed into the parking lot, flinging gravel, a Confederate flag in its cracked back window. Fiercely, Danny turned his key.

  Down the block, in a pawn shop window, ballpoint letters were scrawled across an empty pizza box, forming a crude sign: FIREARMS, CHEAP, ALL OCCASIONS.

  A fireman approached him at a stoplight, waving a rubber boot, asking for change. “Charity drive,” he said. Danny had heard on the news that this fundraiser was illegal.

  Goddam cops. Never do their goddam job.

  He made a pistol with his fingers and aimed it out the window. The fireman stumbled backwards, away from Danny’s door. Coins rained from the boot in his hand.

  Danny swerved, pulled over at the pawn shop, and killed the car. Maybe … His daddy’s strained and distant voice. Maybe we can pick off some quail or something.

  Crazy, he thought.

  His door was open. His feet were on the pavement.

  We never talk, I know.

  Too late now.

  Inside, waffle irons, Pez dispensers, nut crackers, golf clubs, pool cues, microwave ovens, ashtrays, bathrobes. A man showed him a second-hand Seecamp LWS. “Hundred bucks, even,” he said.

  Danny picked up the pistol. Light as bread. “I need it right away,” he said.

  “No problem. Extra twenty, we toss the paperwork.” This man, too, had a burned face.

  Danny handed him six limp bills.

  “There you go, my friend.” The man slapped a horsefly off his wrist. “Now you’re as armed and dangerous as the next man. Have yourself a ball.”

  4

  The light was on in Betty’s room. Libbie parked her van in the drive. The house, which Carla shared with her sister, was a simple, square two-story, with white wooden eaves and a shingled roof. “Quiet, hidden—perfect for a pair of old spinsters,” Carla liked to say.

  A gnarled red oak bent above the roof: an old man waving his arms in despair.

  “Okay, you grab Suzi, I’ll get Robi,” Libbie suggested. “We’ll see if we can make it into the house without being clawed to death.” “Fat chance,” Carla said.

  But they made it fine. Carla patted the wall, trying to find the light switch. The cats vanished beneath the living room chairs.

  “Poor things. They’re freaked,” Carla said.

  “Sissy, is that you?” Betty called from her bedroom upstairs.

  “It’s me, Bets. Libbie’s here. We brought you some company.”

  Betty bounded down the stairs, wearing a thin yellow nightdress. Her hair was a wisp of fog, her face a pudgy block of chalk. At forty-three, she was only two years older than Carla, but the sisters could have passed for elderly aunt and niece. Carla was trim, youthful, mostly free of gray.

  Betty hugged them both, then snatched Libbie’s hand. “Let me show you.” She approached the kitchen table. “Did you know that every flower matches a human emotion?” Her rapid, elliptical talk always startled Libbie. On the table lay dozens of blue construction paper flowers, snipped with a pair of sewing scissors.

  “I should’ve warned you,” Carla whispered to Libbie. “Her latest get-rich scheme.”

  “Well, then.
What’ve you got here?” Libbie said.

  Betty pressed her palms to her chest. “It’s so exciting. I’ve decided to design a series of greeting cards around the language of flowers. The tulip, for example, is a relative newcomer to the West. It didn’t arrive in Europe, all the way from the Orient, until the mid-1500s.”

  Libbie nodded, confused.

  “The name means ‘turban’—maybe I should include this information on the card? What do you think?”

  “Maybe.”

  “The flower represents nourishment and strength. The king and queen of England used to boil and butter the petals and eat them for dinner! I’ll bet you didn’t know that,” Betty said.

  “I didn’t,” Libbie said, tenderly stroking Betty’s arm. In the past, her “exciting” plans had included selling car designs to General Motors, game show proposals to NBC. Her failures never snuffed her spirit.

  “She’s not mentally impaired, exactly, but her mind does wander,” Carla had told Libbie nearly a dozen years ago, right after they’d met. “I don’t know. I guess eccentric’s the word. That’s how one doctor put it, the first of four or five shrinks Mom took her to when she was little. He got Bets to admit she’d witnessed something awful in a park one day when she was two or three, playing with the neighborhood kids—a man yelling and slapping a woman. A couple having a fight, I guess. The doctor suggested this might have traumatized her, especially since our own father raised his voice a lot. But mainly, she was just born distant, my mother said. Maybe she didn’t want to be born at all. Edgar—he’s my boyfriend—he says certain spirits get pulled against their will into the world. Anyway, she’s always done just fine around the house, without medications of any kind, but she doesn’t go out. She’s unemployable. Probably unmarriageable.” Carla had sighed. “Soon after our parents passed away”—they’d died in a car wreck when Carla was twenty—“I resented like hell having to support poor Bets.” These days, she accepted the fact that her sis was a lifelong commitment.

  “There’s some chicken in the fridge,” Betty said now.