by Lee Martin
“For Pete’s sake,” he said, thinking that if he had met her in a foreign land where he wouldn’t have been expecting to see anyone he knew, he might have walked right by her, just for an instant, before he realized who she was.
“Like it?” She gave her head a shake.
She looked, he hesitated to say—and he knew, too late, he had made this clear to her with his silence—sluttish. She looked like the women on his route, the ones past their primes, who tried too hard to look young and provocative. “Desperate women,” Liz had always called them. One of them, a home economics teacher, ended up strangled by an ex-boyfriend, and Liz had dubbed the incident “Betty Crocker Croaked.”
She put a slice of pizza on a saucer. “Willum said it would float your boat.”
“William?”
“Will-um,” she said. “He’s the photographer who did my shoot.”
She had gone to the Super 8, where a company called Private Pics had been offering boudoir photos. She told Del how she had gone into a room where a girl had styled her hair and “done her face,” and into another room where she had chosen an outfit. There had been silky peignoirs and feather boas and, for the especially daring, g-strings and garter belts.
“What do you think I wore?” she asked Del. “Go ahead. Guess.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
She licked tomato sauce from her finger. “You’ll see,” she told him, “when the photos come.”
After she had chosen the outfit, she had gone into yet another room, where Willum, the photographer, had been waiting with his cameras, and his cloth-draped platforms, and his backdrops of lace and velvet and mirrors.
“Just the two of you?” Del said.
“That’s right.”
“Were you afraid?”
Liz put her hands on her hips and stared at him. “I say live a little, sweetie.”
The phone on the breakfast counter rang, and Liz started to answer it.
“No,” Del put his hand over hers. “Let the machine get it.”
They listened to the caller’s voice. It was raspy and severe, but nervous, too, clearly a young boy who was trying to be menacing but wasn’t quite succeeding. With great deliberation, a pause between each word, he said, “This…is…a…prank…call.”
“What kind of joke is that?” Del said.
Liz was laughing. “He said it’s a prank call. What a hoot. He’s trying so hard to be mean, but all he can do is tell us it’s a prank.”
“I don’t think there’s anything funny about it.” Del pressed the delete button and erased the message. “That takes nerve.”
Liz slapped her hand down on the counter. “Don’t tell me you’re spooked by that.”
“I didn’t say I was spooked.”
“Del, it’s just a kid.”
They were eating their pizza when the phone rang once, and then went still. A few minutes later, it happened again.
“It’s that kid,” Del said. “He’s one-ringing us.”
“So, what’s it hurt? Sooner or later, he’ll get tired of it.”
“I wish I knew who that kid was. If I knew where he lived, I’d do something.”
“What?” Liz said, her voice steeled with challenge. “What would you do?”
Del realized that whatever he said, he would appear foolish, a coward picking on a kid.
The phone rang again, and Liz reached across the breakfast counter and unplugged the line from the jack. “If it bothers you so much, that’s all you have to do.” She got up and went into the living room to unplug the phone there, and then moved upstairs, where Del knew she was doing the same to the one in their bedroom. When she returned, she was smiling. She sat down on her stool and spread her napkin over her lap. “There,” she said. “He can’t bother you now. Happy?”
Del was thinking about Liz, scantily dressed, posing for a strange man in a motel room.
He imagined her telling him, this Willum, about the night of the break-in and how her lamebrain husband had left a window open so the burglar could waltz right in.
“I suppose you told him the story,” Del said. “That photographer. He probably got a kick out of your idiot husband.”
Del could imagine Willum’s smirk, his bemused chuckle. What a shame, he had probably been thinking as he studied Liz through the camera’s lens, a woman with such spunk stuck with a dolt like Del.
“No,” Liz said. “I didn’t tell him.” “You didn’t tell him?”
Now it all seemed even sadder to Del, the fact that Liz had been unable to speak of him. He wanted to tell her what the convicts had taught him in their letters, how easy it was to lose the lives they once thought they would have forever. “Some nights, I dream I’m a boy again.” He could recall bits and pieces from the letters he had read. “I slept on ironed sheets.” “My mother made French toast for breakfast.” “I had a collie dog named Scout.”
Early on, he had tried to read parts of the letters to Liz, but she had pooh-poohed them. “Please,” she said. “What a snow job. They’re yanking your chain.”
Deep down, he imagined that was the case, and though it shamed him to be the convicts’ patsy, he couldn’t resist the small, clear truth in all their stories: once they had been different people, perhaps no more loved or hopeful than they were now, but, at the least, innocent. They hadn’t stolen yet, or assaulted, or killed. There had been this time when they had the chance to live regular, decent lives, and that was the time Del tried to remind them of in his letters. He wrote of ordinary things—the scent of a wood fire, the sound of rain dripping from leaves, the white blossoms of pear trees in the spring—all the things he missed from his days on the mail route.
And when the convicts asked, he sometimes sent money so they could know some small pleasure: candy, cigarettes, perhaps a fresh apple bought in the prison commissary.
Then there were the ones like the Korean boy, Kim Ye, who claimed he’d been convicted of a murder he hadn’t committed and waited now on death row at the state penitentiary in Nebraska. If he could raise enough money to secure competent representation, he would prove his innocence in the appeal case. “Mr. Del,” he had written, “I could not do this thing they say. Won’t you help to save me?”
Del was sitting at the desk in the living room writing Kim Ye a check for five hundred dollars when Liz came in to plug in the phone. She put her hands on Del’s shoulders and gave them a sharp squeeze. He heard her sigh. “Oh, Del,” she said, her voice weary with disappointment, and he knew it was useless to try to explain.
Then the phone rang. Liz took her hands from Del’s shoulders. The phone rang again and again.
“All right,” Del finally said. “I’ll answer it.”
The man on the other end of the line sounded like one of those late-night talk radio hosts, his voice low-pitched and soothing. “Chief,” he said, “I’ve been trying to get you. Two hours I’ve been trying.”
“There’s been a problem here,” Del said. “A screw-up with our phones.”
“You get a problem, chief, you fix it.”
“Things are all right now. We’re back in the pink.”
“All right for you,” the man said. “But me? I’m in Dutch.”
“Who are you?” Del asked. “What’s this got to do with me?”
“Everything, chief. You’ve got my keys.”
For a moment, Del was disappointed that the owner of the keys wasn’t a woman, as he had first imagined, an anxious woman he had planned to reassure by returning her keys. But then he heard something new in the man’s voice, a hint of desperation—“tell me where you live”—and he knew the man was in something up to his ears and that Del was the one between him and whatever it was.
“You’re lucky I’m the one who found them,” Del said.
“All right. Yes, I’m lucky. Now tell me. Please. Where do you live?”
After he hung up the phone, Del told Liz about the keys and the man who was coming to claim them.
“Comin
g here?” Liz said.
“That’s right.” Del took the keys from his pocket, tossed them into the air and caught them. He shook his fist as if he were rattling dice. “We’ve got what he needs.”
“A visitor,” said Liz. “Goodness, there’s been no one but us in this house since the night Sneaky Pete broke in.”
“We don’t need to talk about that anymore,” said Del. “That’s ancient history.”
But it was the first thing she told the man, and she told it all, the part about the window Del had left open, the goofy noise he had made when Sneaky Pete stepped into their house. They were standing just inside the doorway, and Del said to her, “He doesn’t want to hear that. God, Liz. Don’t be a pain. He’s just here to pick up his keys.”
“Come on, sweetie,” she said. “Let’s do it together.” She lifted her head, stretched out her neck, and bellowed. “Was it like that, Del?”
“All right,” he said. “That’s enough.”
She clapped her hands together and laughed. She shook those ropy strands of hair that didn’t seem to Del like her hair at all. Then she said to the man, “Isn’t that a scream?”
The man was thin with a shaved head just starting to ash over with stubble. There was a bruise on one of his cheekbones, and above it, a streak of blood muddied the white of his eye. He winked that eye at Liz. “Sis, that’s fine. I need a good laugh. I tell you, I’ve been on the skinny side of paradise quite a good little bit.”
“Trouble?” Liz said.
“Sis, like you don’t know.”
It was his wife, he said. One morning, she bumped her head on a cabinet door. “Just a tap,” he said. “She didn’t give it another thought. A few weeks later? She’s telling me she can hardly see out of her left eye. ‘Sonny,’ she tells me, ‘it’s like someone pulled a curtain over half of my eye.’ Now she’s having surgery tomorrow. Detached retina.”
“All because of a little bump?” Liz said.
Sonny nodded. “Like I told you. Just a tap.”
“That was enough,” Del said. He knew how little it took to throw everything out of whack. He remembered stepping from the curb that day on his mail route and feeling the small lump of the pebble beneath his foot. For a moment, he balanced on it—then it rolled, and his ankle turned, and his knee twisted, and he heard the tendon break with a pop.
Sonny reached up to the security alarm’s control panel on the wall beside him and traced his finger lightly over the keys. Then he turned back to Del and winked again. “Life can get strange. Can’t it, chief? You think you’re just rolling along, and then out of nowhere there’s something you didn’t expect. Like this joker who broke into your house. He saw that open window and thought he’d take a chance. Now you’re all closed in here.”
“Yes,” said Liz. She put her hand on Sonny’s arm and gave it a squeeze. “Closed in. That’s exactly how I feel.”
Del handed the keys to Sonny, then, just so Sonny’s arm would move and Liz’s hand would slip away from it.
“I was on my way to the hospital.” Sonny curled his fingers around the keys. “I stopped by the post office to pick up a package. Then I was going to make a stop at the storage unit I keep out on University Drive.”
“ELF Storage,” Liz said.
“That’s right,” said Sonny. “The ‘S’ is missing on the sign.” Del cleared his throat. “Why do you need a storage unit?” “Business,” said Sonny. “I’m a businessman.” “Del knows all about business,” Liz said. “Don’t you, Del? Del’s an investor.”
“A man with money,” Sonny said.
“Money?” said Liz. “Del’s thrown it away by the fistfuls.”
Sonny put the keys in his pocket and then reached out his hand to Del. “Put her there,” he said. “Chief, this is your lucky night.”
His business, as Sonny explained it, involved wrapping people with bandages. “Head to foot,” he said. “Even your face. Just like a mummy. It’s all done with these plastic bandages soaked in a special mineral solution. Forgive me for not revealing the ingredients, but I can’t give away my secret.” The objective of the wrap was to reduce fat cells and the toxins and fluid around them. “Squeezing out the poison. When my wife had it done in California, she lost fourteen inches all around. I’m going to call my salon Suddenly Slender.”
Del could remember as a kid standing in a doorway, stretching his arms out to the sides, and pressing against the jamb until his muscles gave out and started to tingle. When he stepped back, his arms, which he could no longer feel, lifted into the air as if they were filled with helium. Now he could imagine the body wrap Sonny had described—the tight bandages and the incredible lightness customers would feel once they were released.
“This can be a real moneymaker,” Del said.
“You’ve got that right,” said Sonny. “This is going to be killer. That is, if my wife doesn’t kill me first.” Since yesterday, she had lain in a hospital bed, only on her right side, so the corner of the retina in her left eye could fold back into place before her surgery. “She’s been waiting for me, and now I’m afraid she’s never going to believe why I’m late.”
“Why wouldn’t she believe you?” Del said.
“Long story. Let’s just say I’ve been late before. The thing about this detached retina is, it’s my chance to finally prove I can be dependable.”
“We could help you,” Liz said. “We could go to the hospital with you, and Del could tell your wife how he found your keys.”
“Would you do that, chief?”
“Sure,” Liz moved over to Del and slipped her arm around his waist. She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the forehead. “Won’t you, Del?”
He thought of Kim Ye and how he claimed on the night of the murder he had just happened to pass by the alley where later the woman’s body was found, and someone driving past had seen him. “Wrong place, wrong time, Mr. Del,” he had written. “A minute early, a minute late—no problem.”
Even if Kim Ye was lying, Del couldn’t help but marvel over the mesh of movement and time, and how only one second, given the proper witness, could mean salvation or doom.
He kissed Liz on the cheek and tasted the oil of her makeup. “Glad to,” he said. “Sure thing. Whatever I can do to help.”
Sonny’s panel truck, an old Ford Econoline, was parked in front of Del and Liz’s house. The streetlight was shining through the windshield, and Del could see a pair of panties—baby blue lace—hanging from the rearview mirror. The top of the dashboard was littered with tools: screwdrivers, pliers, a carpet knife.
Liz was chattering away, talking too loudly, the way she had to the police officer the night of the break-in. “Del can tell your wife about the keys,” she said. “And then I’ll explain how we unplugged our phones and you couldn’t get through.”
Del could see she had concocted this plan, both of them working together to help smooth things out between Sonny and his wife.
But Sonny didn’t look pleased. He ran his hand over his shaved head. “You told me there was a problem with the phone,” he said to Del.
“It was this kid,” Del tried to explain. “He was one-ringing us. You know. Being a pest.”
“So you were being a snob.”
“No,” Del said. “We just wanted some quiet.”
“Now I’m in Dutch.” Sonny slapped the side of the panel truck. “All because you were a stuck-up SOB. Goddamn it, chief. You’ve put me in a bind.”
“Don’t worry,” Liz told him. “Calm down. We’re going to help you. We’re going to get in our car right now, Del and me, and we’re going to follow you to the hospital, and we’re going to take care of everything.”
“Okay,” said Sonny. “Right. You’re going to follow me.”
That’s what they did. Out Bonnie Brae, then right on University. Del kept his eyes on Sonny’s panel truck—the dull chrome of its bumper, the two squares of glass in its back doors. “Well, I’m glad we can do this,” Liz said.
�
�Yes,” said Del. “It’s the least we can do.”
“His poor wife.” Liz tilted her head to the side and held it there. “Imagine having to lie on one side so long. I’d go nuts.”
“Healing takes a lot of patience,” Del told her.
“I don’t know if I could do it.”
“You’d do it because you’d want to be you again.”
He was about to try to explain to her why he had shouted at the burglar the way he had, but then Sonny’s panel truck slowed and his turn signal started to blink, and Del, who had gotten too close, had to slam on his brakes.
Liz pitched forward and caught herself by grabbing onto the dash. “Del,” she said, “be careful.”
Sonny turned his panel truck into the lot of ELF Storage, and Del followed because it was what he had promised to do, and from here on, he had decided he was going to be the kind of man people could count on. He remembered all the times he and Liz had driven by and joked about the missing S in the sign, and how one day—he couldn’t recall when—they had stopped joking, the sign just as familiar as any other they expected to see.
So now it didn’t seem unusual to be driving through the gravel lot, turning down an aisle flanked by rows of storage sheds with red sectioned fronts that could be raised like garage doors.
Sonny stopped his panel truck at the end of the aisle, got out, and came back to the car. He motioned for Del to roll down his window. “Sorry for the detour.” Sonny rested his arms on the car door and leaned in toward Del. “I just happened to think I needed to load up some cartons of that mineral solution. Heavy suckers, chief. Can you give me a hand?”
“But your wife,” Del said.
“We’ll just be a minute. Besides, she’s not going anywhere.”
Liz put her hand on the back of Del’s neck and stroked him the way she had always done when they drove home on Saturday nights after dinner and dancing and maybe a nightcap at Peg’s Piano Bar. Sometimes he would take the long way home—down Riverside and out Bellemeade until it curved into Bonnie Brae—just so he could have her there beside him a few minutes longer, so he could feel her hand on his neck, breathe in the scent of her perfume, and catch from time to time the exciting glint of gold from a necklace or pendant or earring as the car slipped through the soft glow of the streetlights.
