Brown-Eyed Girl

by Virginia Swift

  The Unknown Soldiers were, Shane wanted to believe, the nucleus of the world’s next great army. But there wasn’t a man among them who could have made sense out of those stacks of papers, or could even have an idea of how to use what Shane had managed to steal as a beginning. They needed the advice of a trained professional. They needed a historian. He felt sure he could talk to Dr. Boz, as he liked to be called, and get some help.

  Now here came three of the Unknown Soldiers, crowding around him, expecting some answers. He lit a fresh cigarette off the butt of the one he was smoking, looked up at them, and calmly said, “We need a historian.”

  “Why not get a fuckin’ ballet dancer while we’re at it?” Danny snarled, reaching down and slapping Shane hard across the face, nearly making him swallow his cigarette.

  Bobby stepped in to prevent the conversation from deteriorating instantly into a beating. “At ease, Number Four,” he snapped, glaring at Danny and flexing his muscles. “Number Sixteen has obviously failed miserably in his mission. He will explain at once, and then I will decide what to do about his failure. Number Seventeen, you will stand ready for orders.”

  Dirtbag smiled, not a pretty sight.

  Bobby had managed, amazingly, to keep Danny from going berserk and killing Shane and possibly old Number Two himself. Dirtbag appeared to be content to await instructions to harm somebody. Bobby exhaled. “Stand at attention, Number Sixteen,” Bobby barked. “And report.”

  Chapter 16

  Second Coming, High-Rent Rendezvous

  While Dickie fretted and coped, and the Unknown Soldiers contemplated the prospect of bringing in a consulting historian, Sally and Hawk were on the road. That morning she had locked the doors of Meg Dunwoodie’s house, a Laramie milestone. They had thought they’d beat the blizzard by leaving Friday, but by the time they left, around eight a.m., it was already snowing in the pass over route 287, packing down around LaPorte, gray and miserable in Broomfield, bumper-to-bumper from the Mousetrap to the Denver Tech Center. They were in Hawk’s truck, and he was driving. He kept saying things like, “It’ll be better as soon as we get out of this godawful traffic.” But the traffic continued horrible all the way to the Douglas County line. “Denver goes on forever,” he said with a heavy sigh.

  “I’ve got a theory,” Sally said, pouring coffee into the cup-top of her thermos, taking a sip, and handing the cup to Hawk. “My theory is that the city’s sold its soul to the devil so that the Broncos win the Superbowl this year. And in return, Denver will be turned into traffic hell for eternity.”

  “And then, as extra punishment, the team will be sold and moved to San Antonio,” Hawk agreed. “And John Elway will be elected governor on the Republican ticket.”

  For some reason, the line of cars suddenly started moving, and an Isuzu Trooper in front of them got so excited that it lurched forward, fishtailed, and slammed into a Toyota Camry, which in turn whacked a BMW.

  “Shit,” said Hawk. “The snow’s really coming down now. Let’s get out of here.” He swerved over onto the shoulder, took the exit at County Line, and headed south on the first road west of the freeway. “We’ll cruise south a while and then go back to I–25 when the traffic’s lighter.”

  The mounting snow made the going slow. Hawk got out and locked the hubs and put the truck in four-wheel drive. The naked sprawl of endless Denver could have been unbearable in its ugliness, and they told each other as much. It was precisely the kind of time they might get frustrated and annoyed and start picking at each other. They’d been getting along great, for the most part, in this second coming of their romance. But there had of course been testy times. After all, they were crotchety and middleaged and used to making their own rules.

  Hawk was squinting hard through a thick windshield. Sally, not wanting to bug him, looked in his glovebox for tapes and found three: Workingman’s Dead, a Merle Haggard greatest hits compilation, and the Allman Brothers’ Eat a Peach. She put in Workingman’s, and sat with her thoughts about the things she’d started finding in Meg’s basement.

  As it turned out, the key she’d gotten from Ezra Sonnenschein hadn’t opened the office closet, and when she’d called his office to ask him about it, he was off on a safari in the Kalahari or someplace. She’d thought seriously about breaking into the closet, but she hadn’t yet worked up the guts to tell Maude she wanted to do it, and she didn’t feel right about taking a hammer to the lock without asking permission. Sally had found herself fighting a complicated internal war between curiosity, manners, and patience. Patience had never been her long suit, so she substituted method.

  She’d started in the basement, resolving to get through every box there, then go to work upstairs. She hadn’t really read things yet, had just made piles and lists. She’d quickly given up on the reams of financial stuff, old bank statements and stock dividend reports and letters from brokers and tax crap. It was a hideous mess. Deal with it later.

  There was a lot of the kind of plain junk files teachers collect over the years—faded and yellowed mimeos of assignments, papers students hadn’t ever picked up, defunct memos from deceased administrators. There were a dozen boxes of those things. Just contemplating having to go through those damned boring files page by page made Sally decide to charge this trip south to her Dunwoodie Foundation travel account—she’d think of a reason later.

  Slightly more interesting, and rather heartening when you thought about it, there were literally hundreds of letters from grateful students, most of them formulaic, in the nature of thank-you notes. But occasionally there was something eloquent. Sally had collected a few of those from her own students, but the sheer volume of those unsolicited testimonials made her think Meg must have been something special as a teacher. One note in particular had caught her eye, a letter signed by a boy who had become a famous man writing spare stories about the high plains. “You were hard and fair,” he wrote. “Thanks for not being nice to me.”

  Then there were the cards and letters from friends and family, which tended toward the genres of “Having a wonderful time in Miami,”

  “Cousin Emilia is recovering from the gout,”

  “Come see us in Jackson,” and “Looking forward to our visit to Wyoming next July.” She wondered wryly, watching the heavy windshield wipers labor back and forth, if she’d find any letters from devoted pals who were looking forward to their visit to Wyoming next February.

  Sally had also made piles of travel brochures, souvenirs, random train tickets, itineraries and triptychs, hotel receipts, and restaurant menus. She’d found printed programs from the musical evenings Meg had talked about in the interview with Edna. There were lots of fragile old maps, which she hadn’t bothered to unfold. Meg had done quite a bit of traveling when she was living in Paris, much of it to the Alps in France, Italy, and Switzerland, to the Pyrenees in France and Spain. It seemed she’d found plenty of occasions to get back to the mountains. Sally hoped there would be photographs.

  Like most reporters, Meg had kept scrapbooks of her clippings. Sally expected to spend lots of time trying to envision Meg as a witness to, perhaps a participant in, the big events people like to call history. The scrapbooks would be invaluable.

  Most exciting of all, Sally had begun to find typescripts and handwritten drafts of poems she was certain had never been published. When she’d found the first one, she’d spent an hour reading, puzzling, savoring, and admiring. When she’d found ten more, she’d read them through without trying to work out the meaning. When she’d come across another thirty, she’d glanced over them and stacked them up for later careful study. Eventually, she would have to consult with somebody who knew something about poetry. But at least, she thought in her philistine way, a cache of new Dunwoodie poems was bound to make waves on the literary scene, not to mention pumping up the market value of the biography.

  It had felt like a good idea to make a separate pile of stuff Meg collected during her European years. There were notes from her mother and many letters from
her father. A few glances told Sally that Gert Dunwoodie’s letters had consisted mostly of funny anecdotes, encouragement about Meg’s writing, and concern about the dangers of the political situation in Europe. Mac’s letters were something different, long on denunciations of the New Deal in general and FDR in particular. Even somebody determined not to read those letters of Mac Dunwoodie’s had to notice those pointed references to Jewish bankers and international conspiracies. As a historian, Sally was grimly looking forward to taking a closer look at those loaded letters from the father to the daughter.

  Other letters were from Wyoming friends like the Professors McIntyre and White, and from assorted Paris connections, including the artist Giselle Blum and her brother Paul. Meg also had a few regular correspondents in other places. There had been dozens from a man who, from the stamps and postmarks, lived in Berlin but traveled all over hell and gone. His name was Ernst Malthus.

  Sally had found those letters early Thursday evening. On a roll, making piles, sorting things, she got to the box with the Malthus correspondence. She had been slouching in the basement since eight that morning. Her back hurt, but her mind was utterly focused. She was dying to wade into Malthus’s letters—any man who wrote that often had to be a lover. It was plausible that a lover didn’t matter, but in Sally’s expert opinion, the ones who wrote letters did.

  On the morning she’d opened the Malthus box, something jogged her memory. She went back to the stack of programs from the musical evenings in Paris. Yes. There was his name, Ernst Malthus. He’d been listed as piano soloist on a program in June, 1929.

  His hands in the Giselle Blum drawings? Was his the “brush of the key” between memory and hope? The questions flew through her head. Night was coming on, but Sally’d had no more intention of breaking for dinner than she’d managed to take time for breakfast or lunch.

  Maude, however, had other ideas. Maude had figured out that sometimes when she was working, Sally wouldn’t get around to eating unless somebody dragged her off and fed her. Sally was in the process of putting the letters and postcards from Malthus in chronological order according to the date on the postmark, when Maude arrived and insisted that Sally stop at once and have something to eat. For the first time that day, Sally noticed that she was feeling a little light-headed, so she got up and went upstairs and let Maude stuff her with pot roast and mashed potatoes. Then Hawk showed up, coincidentally in time for dinner, wanting to know if she was all packed. She hadn’t even started, which made him grumpy.

  “We need to get an early start and it’s already eight o’clock,” he’d pointed out. He generally liked to be in bed by nine. This was one of the things that bugged her. When she felt like working, she didn’t like to be told it was time for bed or anything else, great sex notwithstanding. Middle-aged Sally was ready to sacrifice the likelihood of bodily pleasure for the possibility of an intellectually fruitful couple of hours. Who the hell would ever have believed that? Feeling slightly embarrassed, she’d put off returning to the basement and gone ahead to bed with him. The sex might have even been worth it.

  The interruption, Sally thought, was probably all for the best anyway. Once she’d gotten started on this new and fascinating thread, her plan to sort the whole mess first would be shot to hell. And more to the point, if she’d gotten going, she wouldn’t have wanted to quit working and go on vacation. Now she had a break and knew that when she got back, she’d pick up the work at a great place, with plenty of momentum.

  “Hey, Mustang,” Hawk broke into her musing. “What are you thinking about?”

  She realized then that he had only heard Workingman’s Dead maybe fifteen hundred times, and he probably needed some entertaining at this point, threading his way along snowy back roads toward I–25. And she was thinking about whether she preferred sex or work. Not something he needed to hear. “Aw, I was just kind of making a list of the stuff I piled up in Meg’s basement. I found some letters I’d really like to go through right away, but I’m wondering if I ought to stick with my original plan of opening all the boxes just to see what-all’s there.”

  Hawk raised an eyebrow. “Fascinating question.”

  “Yeah, I guess it’s always gripping to hear somebody talk about their homework.”

  Hawk didn’t push her. As he knew, she was supposed to keep quiet about her research, and he was a man who didn’t believe in making anybody talk about anything. He drove on in silence. But after a while, he must have decided he needed the sound of her voice to drown out the monotonous shushing of the windshield wipers. “I suppose there are advantages and disadvantages to stopping in the middle of the piles to take on something in particular, or going through all the boxes before focusing on anything. Or, you could just heave everything into the middle of the room and pull papers out at random.”

  “It’d probably make as much sense,” she admitted. “There’s no logic either way.”

  “You must have some idea of what in there is likely to be interesting,” he said, spotting a sign for the interstate and carefully turning left, his tires slipping a little.

  “Oh yeah, definitely,” she said, thinking about the poems, about what might be love letters from Ernst Malthus, about all the letters from Mac, the Paris friends, the bits and pieces from so many trips. And she even thought idly about Edna’s story about the legend of buried treasure, but so far she hadn’t found anything that looked like a topo map of the Sierra Madre with a pirate’s cross marking the spot. “At this point, I’m not far enough along to have my head around it.”

  Hawk steered the truck up the on-ramp to the interstate. “Well, why don’t you try to think of something to keep me amused while I work on sledding this thing on down to Tucson.”

  So to pass the time in a friendly way, they decided to play a game called, “What I’m Going to Do to You When We Get to a Motel.” There were a number of subthemes in the game, including what kind of motel, where it would be, what kind of room they needed, in what order and how to deal with the clothes they were wearing, how a bathtub and a shower might become useful equipment, how fortunate it was that they had a bottle of whiskey. They moved on to a question and answer format, to wit:

  Sally: “I realize that in these weather and driving conditions it would be inadvisable for me to remove my shirt, but if I did, would you find it a distraction?”

  Hawk: “It would certainly be a distraction. Indeed, it’s a little bit disconcerting contemplating the prospect. Maybe you could just sneak your shirt up a little bit for a second or two and flash just a little bit of skin, so it would be only a little distracting and not actually inspire me to drive off the road.”

  This sort of conversation kept him in a variable but enjoyable and not too distracting state of alertness from Colorado Springs to Pueblo. He looked so cute, his ponytail half pulled out, concentrating on the road with his hands tight on the wheel, that it had her wondering aloud if it would be worth the likelihood of a fatal accident if she put her head in his lap. Signifyin’ woman, that Sally.

  They should have made Pueblo by lunchtime, but instead, dusk was coming on. More and more they were quiet. Hawk listened to the AM radio, hoping for reliable weather reports. The blizzard let up some in south Colorado, but the news wasn’t good—this was a huge, wet storm, stretching all the way back to the Sierra Nevada, which was only getting a running start on dumping a hell of a lot of snow on everything north of Albuquerque. They pulled off the interstate at a Pancake Inn in Pueblo, debated whether to push on over more coffee and onion rings that had evidently been fried in motor oil. This place made the Wrangler look like Chez Panisse. “We could get a room and start out real early tomorrow and still make Tucson by late tomorrow night,” Sally tried lamely.

  “I’d rather keep going as long as we can,” Hawk said, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes and hoping to put a dent in his fatigue with the lousy coffee. “Depending on how much it snows tonight, we could end up stuck wherever we stop for a couple of days.”

 
Man, he had good brown eyes. Big and dark and deep, and his eyelashes were longer than any girl’s she’d ever known. It was a lucky thing he was so nearsighted and wore those John Lennon spectacles. Otherwise, she’d be beating off the competition with a two-by-four. “In that case,” said Sally, “I vote for Santa Fe. At least there’ll be good coffee and hot chile.”

  “And an amusing California chardonnay, if it comes to that,” Hawk sneered lightly at her as he put his glasses back on. “Next best thing to being in Santa Monica.”

  “I wouldn’t turn it down,” Sally admitted.

  Sally was driving as they fought whiteouts between Raton and Glorieta. She was actually a much better driver in rotten weather, which made her careful. It was dark but bright with swirling snow. They’d decided that what they really wanted was a motel room with a hot tub, and they figured Santa Fe was the only town between Denver and Tucson that would be full enough of bicoastals to have the amenities. Their necks and backs ached and their eyes burned from staring into the dappled blackness. Sally’s insides felt like poisoned rocks from bad coffee and worse food.

  And then suddenly, sometime around ten o’clock, a hole opened up in the storm. They drove through a ground blizzard into a clear place where a huge, spotlit billboard reared up in front of them advertising the Legacy of Conquest Inn on Cerillos Road, an establishment claiming to be “New Mexico’s most authentic hostelry,” boasting “inroom movies, Jacuzzis, and HBO.”

  “Conquest my ass,” said Sally.

  “My pleasure,” said Hawk, giving her thigh a little squeeze as she navigated her way off the freeway, down the icy artery, and into the motel parking lot. “But I think they’re really thinking about conquering our credit cards.”