Hailey's War

by Jodi Compton

She fired twice more, and the rounds made dirt fly up from the hillside, about eight feet from the cop. He was on his feet now, running in an evasive zigzag.

  I threw open the Bronco’s door and leaned out. “Warchild!” I yelled. “Stand down! He’s running!”

  She turned and looked at me.

  “It’s okay!” I reiterated. The cop had gained the tree line and disappeared.

  She nodded, understanding. I made the shape of a phone with my thumb and little finger against my cheek, then pulled myself back into the car and picked up the radio from between my feet.

  “We gotta get out of here,” I told her, without preamble. “Here’s what we’ll do: Payaso’s gonna drive the cop’s car up the road a mile, so that the guy can’t get to his radio right away. Then I’ll pick him up again.” I looked at Payaso, who nodded assent. “Then we’ll follow you. Just get us off Highway One. Find us a back road out of the county.”

  “Ten-four,” she said. “What if we see the enemigo?”

  “I hope we won’t,” I said. “The Highway Patrol is gonna be looking for him; maybe they’ll find him and hang him up for a while.”

  “But if we see him?”

  “Shit, I don’t know. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  So Payaso got out of the car. In a minute, he was behind the wheel of the patrol car, heading south.

  In the back of the car, Nidia was sniffling. I glanced backward and saw her fighting tears.

  Shit. I rubbed the bridge of my nose, thinking hard. “Hey, don’t do that,” I said. “Really, the worst is over. You’re in good hands.”

  She didn’t say anything to that or look reassured, and I couldn’t entirely blame her. I spent another second or two trying to think of something else to say, then gave up and pulled out onto the highway. My mood, whether it was warranted or not, was on the rise. In a moment I caught myself whistling and realized it was Simon and Garfunkel: “Feelin’ Groovy.”

  thirty-eight

  “We should’ve got a car from Chato instead,” Serena said for the third time.

  The four of us were at a pizza restaurant. Payaso, who had taken instantly and seriously to his role as Nidia’s guardian, was at the salad bar with her, watching her select fresh vegetables and cottage cheese and pineapple chunks. Serena and I were at a table. I had just washed down a pair of Advil with Mountain Dew for my aching finger. It should have been healed by now, except that I’d reinjured it in the fight with Serena’s girls, my jumping-in. And now the scuffle with Skouras’s guy had aggravated it. At this rate, it’d never be healed up.

  Serena’s face was dark, and I knew what she was going to say next.

  “You spent nearly six thousand dollars on that SUV and now it’s gone,” she said. “You had it for what, a week and a half? What a waste.”

  I agreed with her. I’d already said that I agreed with her. The Bronco was in a picturesque abandoned barn where no one would find it for months. Maybe years. Because unless the highway patrolman we traumatized hadn’t followed procedure, he’d radioed in the make, model, and license of our car before he’d gotten out and approached me. Given that a routine speeding stop had turned into an armed attack on a law-enforcement officer, the Bronco was now hot as hell, and I’d had to abandon it.

  Now we were all riding in the GTO, which was safe. I doubted the highway patrolman even remembered the color of that car. In moments of trauma-like a speeding car bearing down on you-the mental videographer usually doesn’t capture many details.

  Serena said, “If you’d had a stolen car, you wouldn’t be out any money when you had to dump it.”

  I said, “I know. But I’ve been driving all over the damn state for ten days. If I’d had a stolen car all that time, some enterprising meter maid would have run the plate by now, and I’d be arrested, and then the mission would never have happened.”

  She said, “Maybe you could have driven around and done the research and the reconnaissance in the SUV, but then taken a stolen ride to get Nidia.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said.

  So this was leadership, being the goat when things went wrong, even small things. It wasn’t like our mission had failed, overall. But Serena was wound up, frustrated over what hadn’t gone well.

  I said, “We’re hitting over five hundred, you know. We have Nidia.”

  “Mmm,” she said, a noncommittal sound.

  “What?”

  She looked across the tables, toward Nidia and Payaso. “You’ve got a choice here,” she said. “You wanted to rescue her and now she’s rescued. Are you sure you want to keep babysitting her?”

  I sipped a little of my Mountain Dew. “Yeah, I do,” I said. “Skouras isn’t going to say, ‘Win some, lose some,’ about this. She can’t handle this herself.” Then I said, “If you’re not in-”

  “I’m not saying that,” Serena said quickly. “I’m sorry, prima, I’m just nervous. It’s just that we’re out in the middle of nowhere, the old man and his crew are gonna be looking for us all over, and Jesus, I left Trippy in charge back at home.” She frowned. “We probably weren’t even around the corner in the car before she rounded everyone up and started a war with Tenth Street. She hates their asses.”

  I nodded in sympathy, but my thoughts were elsewhere. I looked over to where Nidia was, still slowly choosing from the salad bar.

  In the shady confines of the old barn where we’d hidden the Bronco, Serena and I had done a short debriefing with Nidia. We’d sent Payaso away, outside, so she could speak freely, and then Serena had begun firing questions at her, in rapid Spanish: Are you okay? Did they hurt you? Touch you? Did they mess with your head?

  Nidia had shaken her head, saying no, no. Serena hadn’t seemed to believe her. Are you sure? she’d demanded.

  Serena, I’d cut in, stop tripping. They were under orders from Skouras. They wouldn’t have done things like that.

  I’d been worried that she was going to get Nidia upset, as Payaso nearly had earlier, in the car, with his rant against the American law. I’d also been surprised at Serena’s depth of concern for the girl she’d dismissed as a “little vic” earlier. But some things were women’s concerns; they transcended petty differences.

  When I’d gotten Serena to shut up, Nidia had told us the story. Most of it confirmed what we’d already guessed. The baby she was carrying was Adrian Skouras’s, and Tony Skouras knew about it and wanted the child. Nidia’s family, likewise, had known. They had thought that a tiny village in Mexico, if Nidia disappeared quickly and completely, would be a remote enough place to hide from him. I’d been right about all that.

  I’d been wrong about how Tony Skouras had learned about his grandchild. Adrian had not revealed it to his father on his deathbed. Instead, when Nidia had missed her period, she’d asked the help of his home-care nurse with arranging a pregnancy test. The nurse had known even before Adrian had. After Adrian’s death, she apparently told the old man about the joyous life-in-the-midst-of-death fact of Nidia’s pregnancy.

  Just days before his death, Adrian had warned Nidia that his father would want the child and would use any means necessary to get sole control of it. Nidia had kept her pregnancy a secret for that reason, never guessing that the nurse would use the information to her advantage.

  “That fucking bitch,” Serena had said, as if personally affronted.

  After Adrian’s death, Skouras Sr. and his lawyer came to the house with a rich financial offer for Nidia to give up the child, and Nidia had realized that if she didn’t take the carrot, she’d get the stick. She didn’t want money. She wanted her child to be safe from its grandfather. She’d pretended to feel ill and fled out the back door of Adrian’s house.

  She’d stayed with her family only a few days. They had known Skouras would be looking for them. As I’d thought earlier, their very anonymity had protected them. If they’d been a middle-class suburban family, he could have found them in the phone book. But her family had wisely fled to another part of the state, while N
idia went to stay with an old friend of her mother’s in Oakland.

  Nidia also told us that after she’d been taken from the tunnel, Skouras’s men had driven her to a rented house where a doctor had checked her out for signs of shock after the traumatic events of the day. Then they’d taken her to the airport and brought her back to California by private plane.

  Nidia had been under guard in Gualala ever since, treated courteously, fed a healthy diet with plenty of prenatal vitamins, and checked out regularly by a doctor whom the big man-I assumed she meant Babyface-brought up to the house. I’d wondered if the doctor had been the passenger in the Mercedes today.

  Payaso and Nidia came back to the table, and in a few minutes, a waiter came out with a pizza that Payaso, Serena, and I would share, and a chicken sandwich for Nidia.

  Nidia was quiet, but then, she’d always been quiet. I believed her, though, that Skouras’s men hadn’t mistreated her. That lined up with what I’d told Serena: They wouldn’t have physically or sexually abused the mother-to-be of Mr. Skouras’s grandchild. I didn’t know what psychic scars Nidia was carrying, but she was functioning, and that was going to have to be enough. I’d learned to do a lot of things the hard way in the past few months, but I wasn’t going to learn to be a therapist.

  “It’s a good thing we didn’t bring Deacon,” Payaso said, pulling a slice of pizza free of the pie. “My car would be way too crowded.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’ve got a lot of driving ahead of us.”

  “Back to L.A.?” Serena said.

  “No,” I said. “We’re going east.”

  thirty-nine

  The McNair sisters, Julianne and Angeline, had been the most beautiful girls in their high-school class back in West Virginia. As with many pairs of sisters who turn heads, the key to their appeal was their contrasts. Angeline, the older of the two, had seraphic red-gold hair and pale blue eyes that her sons, Constantine, Cletus, and Virgil, all inherited. Julianne had glossy dark-brown hair, and her eyes were a deep iris blue. Angeline was engaged by her senior year of high school, to a funny shade-tree mechanic named Porter Mooney. Julianne drank and danced and remained uncommitted through graduation, when she left West Virginia with a girlfriend to see America.

  Julianne was both pretty and smart. She was quick-witted to the point of cruelty, but people forgave her easily, because she illustrated why people call intelligence “brightness.” She drew the eye and held it. In photos, you can see that she knows exactly how to lean out for a man to light her cigarette, in a way that is fetching but not too accommodating. He still has to reach. She is the object.

  She met a young Army private in a bar just off the base where he was stationed in Texas and married him six months later. Henry Cain was her emotional opposite-simple, hardworking, forthright. To this day, I still don’t know what their marriage was really like. Part of that is because he died when I was very young. But part of it’s probably deliberate obtuseness on my part. I had loved my father; I didn’t want to believe he was unhappy for twelve years. I did know that in conversation, Julianne had used her brains and verbal quickness to chase him around rhetorically like a jay harries a hawk. He’d never openly expressed anger with her. Sometimes, when she would excoriate him for small things, he would shake his head and say quietly, “Why do you have to be like that, Jewels?”

  I suppose she did love him, because she loved men in general. After his death, there had been plenty more. Air Force men and guards at the prison, then a switch to artistic blue-state New Men in Santa Barbara and Ojai, where she lived after I went east for school. She’d followed the latest one to Truckee, nearly on the Nevada line. Pretty soon she’d tire of the quiet Sierra life and move to a city, where the lights were brighter and the dating pool bigger.

  She had always worked-she couldn’t have afforded not to-but through it all, and between drags on a cigarette, she declared that the world was a man’s world, ambition a joke. Sincerity was anathema to her, a form of submission. Her dislike of authority and sincerity found its natural enemy in her husband’s employer, the Army. Drilling with rifles, starting and stopping and turning when you were told, snapping your hand to your forehead every time you approached someone who outranked you-she thought it was Boy Scouting on steroids. It was not coincidence that I told nearly a dozen people my plans to apply to the United States Military Academy before I finally told Julianne.

  “I despair of you,” she’d told me. “You could do anything, and this is what you want? The Army?”

  “It’s not just the Army,” I’d said, not once but many times. “It’s West Point.”

  In her way, Julianne thought she was a feminist, just by virtue of being smart and having casual sex, of mocking supermodels and cheerleaders. For that reason, she could never admit that being beautiful was important to her. She hid it so well that I was into adulthood before I realized how much she liked it that I wasn’t as good-looking as she was.

  She was subtle. She was careful to reassure me that my port-wine birthmark wasn’t “disfiguring” and gave my face “character.” I never noticed how often she brought the subject up even when I wasn’t worrying about it. She sighed, too, about the shallow “California ideal” of the blue-eyed blonde. “It’s too bad you didn’t inherit my eyes instead of your father’s,” she’d say. “Californians are so hung up on that.”

  I was mostly okay with not being as beautiful as my mother because I’d long ago realized that it was the reason we got along even as well as we did. If I had been better-looking, our relationship would have been a lot nastier. And had I been beautiful and my father still alive for Julianne and me to compete over-I didn’t even like to think about that.

  As it was, I spent my youth being her foil: poor, sweet Hailey, who’d inherited her father’s plain brown eyes and his ass-aching sincerity and went east to play soldier girl in a touching attempt to emulate him. If Julianne “despaired” of me, she privately enjoyed doing so.

  I’d called her from the road, told her I was coming up to her little trailer on a half-acre of land outside Truckee. I hadn’t told her that I was coming up with a ganged-up entourage. All in due time.

  I’d explained the logic to Serena and Payaso: “It’s not traceable to her, and thus not to me. The land and the trailer both belong to this guy she nearly married. When their relationship fell apart, she started paying rent, but everything’s in his name.”

  Now it was about ten in the morning, and we were ascending her driveway. We’d driven all night, taking turns behind the wheel, Nidia sleeping on Payaso’s shoulder. Awake now, Nidia was looking out the window. She didn’t look too happy to see more forested land outside, just like Gualala. I suspected she was probably more homesick for city light and fast food than Payaso and Serena and I were. She’d been without those things a lot longer.

  Julianne came out onto her front steps, cigarette and lighter in hand. She lifted the cigarette to her mouth, then stopped when she saw that there were four people, not one, in the car.

  Payaso killed the ignition. I said, “You’d better let me talk to her first.”

  Serena said, “She doesn’t know who we are?”

  “I’m easing her into this,” I said.

  I got out of the car. My legs felt shaky, and not just because I’d been riding for so long. My mother hated being told what to do, and I’d never had to try before.

  I walked up to the front steps.

  “Well,” she said. “Hello, darling.”

  “Hey,” I said. “You’re looking good.”

  “Thank you,” she said. It was true.

  “You didn’t say you were coming with friends,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “Sorry, I didn’t.”

  She lit the cigarette, the better to give me a narrow-lashed look through the cloud of start-up smoke. “So who are they?”

  “The woman in the backseat is Serena, an old friend of mine from L.A.,” I said. “The guy behind the wheel is Payaso. And the girl in the pa
ssenger seat is Nidia. She’s six months’ pregnant and needs a place to hide until her baby is born. That’s why we’re all here.”

  Julianne said, “Where, exactly, do you mean by ‘here’?” It was clear from the pointedness of the question that she already understood.

  I pointed to the ground. “Right here.”

  “Is this a joke, Hailey?”

  “I think we should go inside to talk,” I said.

  She opened the door and I followed her into her low-ceilinged living room. I said, “This girl, Nidia-it’s hard to explain, but it’s my responsibility to take care of her. I don’t have a home of my own to take her to. This is the only place I have.”

  Julianne said, “They can’t stay here, Hailey. It’s out of the question.”

  I’d anticipated that answer, and pulled out a roll of ten fifty-dollar bills. It was part one of two tactics I thought would persuade her.

  “I think you should go to Nevada and stay with Angeline and Porter until we’re gone,” I told her. “This is for gas money and expenses. You could stay here, but I think you’d be more comfortable at your sister’s. Plus, I’d feel better about it. There are men looking for Nidia. I came here because this is someplace they can’t trace us to, but if somehow they did, there’s going to be a firefight, and I’d want you safely away from here.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “A ‘firefight’?” she echoed. “I don’t know what you’re up to, Hailey, but maybe you should get some kind of therapy. I don’t think it’s healthy for you to be getting involved with criminals and playing soldier to assuage your feelings over West Point not working out. I-”

  Part two: I crossed my arms, pulled my sweatshirt over my head, and stood in front of her in just my bra. As Julianne stared, confused by my behavior, I touched the corrugated, dark-pink scars from where I’d been shot. “Do you know what these are?” I asked.

  She knew, I thought, but just couldn’t process the information.

  “I got shot,” I told her. “Twice.”