by Billie Letts
“He paid me up front. ‘Up front.’ And the first thing we’re going to do is rent us a nice place in the Paradise zone.”
Fate’s eyes grew wide with the realization that one of his dreams was about to come true. He grabbed up the bills, yelled, “Yippee!” and began jumping up and down in his stocking feet, first on one bed, then on the other.
“Quit, before you fall. If you hurt yourself, some of this money’ll go to pay a doctor’s bill.”
“Okay,” he said, short-winded by his excitement. “When can we move?”
“As soon as we find a place, but I’ll be filming the next three days, and the director, a man named Philo, said I’d be working late. Maybe real late.”
“What about your job at Denny’s?”
“I guess I’ll get there when I get there. If we finish filming at ten, I’ll have plenty of time to change into my uniform and get to work on time. If we film past ten, I’ll just be late. I’m going to talk to Viper tonight, see if there’s any way he can cover for me if I’m late.”
“So when do you think I can start school?”
“I think you ought to let those bruises fade first; otherwise, you’ll start at Paradise looking like a punching bag. I don’t care how highfalutin that school is, there’ll be boys who’ll want to prove how tough they are by beating the crap out of the new kid, especially if he’s already black-and-blue. Besides, we have to move first so you’ll have an address in the zone. How about we look for a place on Saturday and you start your classes on Monday?”
“That sounds great. Just great.” Then he leaned across the space between them and gave Lutie a hug. “Thanks,” he said, his voice constricted by the lump in his throat, the way he felt when he was about to cry.
“So what do you think?” Lutie asked.
“Well,” Viper said, “you can probably get by with coming late once or twice. After that, you’re history here.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“But look at it like this, Belinda. Working here, whether it’s waiting tables, cooking, washing dishes . . . they’re all shitty jobs. So if you lose this one, you just move on to the next.”
“You’re right.” Lutie flashed him a smile. “Thanks for making me feel better about it. Now, the next problem is finding a decent place, an apartment close to the school Fate’s going to.”
“What school’s that?”
“Paradise Elementary.”
“Yeah? Guess if you’ve got to go to grade school, that’s a good one. But what do I know? I quit after the fourth grade.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“How’d you get by with that?”
“Had a guy I know make up a phony death certificate.”
Lutie started laughing.
“Yeah,” Viper said. “I think I died of polio. Can’t remember. Polio or measles. School even sent a letter of condolence to my mom.”
“What’d she do?”
“Nothing. She didn’t give a shit. Long as she had her Marlboros and a bottle of vodka, she stayed happy.”
Rodney, the night-shift dishwasher, reached behind Viper for a stack of plates. “’Scuse me, Belinda, but I heard you say you wanted a place close to the university.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, my brother and his wife live in that area. They got a pretty nice apartment, think they pay like four hundred a month. I could ask them if there’s any vacancies if you want me to.”
“I’d sure appreciate it, Rodney.”
“Where you and your brother living now?”
“We have a room at the Gold Digger Inn out on North Main.”
“Girl I knew was murdered there couple of years back. Guy slit her throat.”
“Oh, man. I want to get out of there. Soon as I can find a place, I’m gone.”
“I’ll talk to my brother when I get home, see if he knows about a vacancy at the Regency where they live. You have a cell phone? I can give you a call.”
“No, but just call the motel. Ask for room one thirty-eight.”
“Will do.”
“Thanks, Rodney. Thanks a lot.”
“You bet.”
“Order’s up,” Viper said. “Table four, two ham-and-cheese omelets.”
“Got it,” Lutie said as she picked up the plates and headed for table four, sidestepping three drunk boys, much too young to be able to buy booze. Just old enough to drink it.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
LUTIE’S FIRST DAY of filming had left her feeling raw—the best word she could think of to describe the humiliation of what she’d done. Raw flesh, raw emotions, raw images playing in her head, images she couldn’t seem to shake even with the high she was feeling from her dwindling stash of cocaine.
She’d gone through most of it during the breaks they took when Philo had to reset the lights or when he needed to adjust his camera or tinker with the tripod. But she hadn’t needed to worry about hiding her habit. Ebony, Lingo, and Brice had their own stash and used it openly in a small canteen with tables, chairs, coffeepot, and fridge, a room just a doorway away from the set and out of Philo’s view.
But as degrading as some of the acts she’d already performed in front of Philo and his camera had been, she’d felt even worse when, during their lunch break, Philo had come into the canteen for a cup of coffee. When he’d glimpsed her snorting coke at one of the tables, he’d turned away quickly, pretending he hadn’t seen her, but not before she saw the expression on his face, an expression of both sorrow and disappointment. A look she’d seen before on her mother’s face when she’d caught her in a lie.
Now, even though it was dark, she’d parked the car as far from their room at the Digger as she could. She didn’t want to take the chance that Fate might not have closed the curtains. She could only imagine how he’d feel if he saw her in the parking lot taking a hit.
Besides, she needed a little extra time before she went in and faced him, fearing that something in her behavior or the way she looked would communicate to him what she’d been doing.
She tried to think of how their conversation would go, the questions he’d ask about filming a toothpaste commercial, about the story she’d tell, the lies she’d have to come up with. But the coke she’d just snorted screwed up her thinking, so she gave it up, deciding that she couldn’t control whatever talk took place between her and her brother.
Instead, she concentrated on what she wanted more than anything just then: to brush her teeth and take a shower, the water as hot as she could stand it. She checked her watch, relieved to find that she had plenty of time to clean up, get into her uniform, and get to Denny’s on time for her shift.
When she finally felt she had pulled herself together, she locked her script inside the glove compartment, then dropped her keys into her purse. It hadn’t taken her long to discover that she didn’t have many lines to memorize. Her character was more interested in action than conversation, but the script told her where to stand, when to crawl onto the bed, and what to do with both Ebony and Lingo once she had placed herself into the correct position.
Just as she started to get out of the car, she saw two figures approaching, two men, she thought, but she couldn’t make out their features in the dark.
When she realized they were coming for her, she locked the doors, then fumbled inside her purse for the keys. But the weight of her key chain caused them to sink to the bottom of her bag, burying them with a charm bracelet, tampons, hair clips, tissue, combs, tubes of lipstick, gum, a spiral notebook, and three pens.
Just as they reached the car, she saw that one of the men was Rodney, the night cook who’d offered to help her find an apartment. The other was a guy she hadn’t seen before. He was big, maybe two eighty, over six feet tall, wearing a T-shirt that said, “The Lord Sees What You’re Doing.”
“Hey, Lutie,” Rodney said.
“I told you my name is Belinda.”
“Yeah, I know what you said, Lutie.”
She hadn’t realized until then that her window was down a couple of inches, not enough for Rodney to get his hand through, but enough that they could talk without yelling.
“What do you want?” Lutie asked.
“We was in the neighborhood, thought we’d pay you a visit.”
He didn’t wait for her response but tried her locked door. “Let me in, baby. We need to do some business.”
“What kind of business?”
“’Bout some blow I got for you. Me and my bro there, Huff, we gonna give you a good price.”
“Sorry, Rodney, but I don’t have any money. Maybe when I get paid, I can—”
“Hey, white sugar, you got six bills in that bag.” He gestured to Lutie’s purse. “I seen ’em when you made a buy from Viper. So you can let me in, or you can pass the money out to me, but either way I’m gonna get it.”
“Huh-uh. That money’s gone. I put it all down on an apartment today.”
“You jackin’ me ’round now, Lutie. And that’s a mistake. A big mistake.”
“No, really. I found a place over on—”
“You was makin’ a hump flick today, girl. Puttin’ that cooch out there for that fag.”
“How do you know that?”
“I got ways. Now, you gonna give me the money or am I gonna have to come in there and take it? Your choice.”
Lutie rolled her window closed and tried again to snag her keys, but Huff, with a metal pipe the size of a baseball bat, struck Lutie’s window. She screamed, but the sound was trapped inside the car. She hit the horn, causing several of her neighbors at the Digger to look out their windows, but a quick look at what was happening was enough to cause them to close their shades.
She kept honking, though, until Huff shattered her window, peppering her with shards of glass, one embedding itself in her cheek, another in her arm. Others rained in, striking her mostly in her face.
When Huff reached into the car, trying to pry her purse from her hands, she sank her teeth into his arm, biting down into his flesh until she brought blood, dripping from his arm and smearing across her mouth and chin.
“You bitch!” He jerked his arm out to inspect his wound before Rodney pulled up the lock and opened the door. He grabbed Lutie’s purse, fished inside her wallet, and pulled out the six hundred dollars he’d come for, then tossed her purse into the backseat.
“Now,” he said. “Since you done caused us so much trouble, believe you better pull down your pants and show us what you got down there. See if we want some of it.”
When he grabbed her arm and pulled her to him, she spat in his face.
“You shit-head!” she screamed. “You rotten shit-head!”
Furious now, Rodney swiped at her spittle with his shirtsleeve, then pulled her out of the car. When she fell onto the concrete parking lot, she heard the crack of a bone but didn’t feel the pain. Not for several seconds. Then she saw a finger hanging at an odd angle.
Huff, savage now, drew back his foot and kicked her in her rib cage, the side of her head, her shoulder, her hip, while Rodney was working her jeans off despite her kicking at him, clawing his face, throwing ineffectual punches, though she put as much energy as she had into each one.
Then she heard Fate.
“Lutie,” he hollered, “where are you?”
“Here, Fate. Here. Help me!”
When Fate rounded the last row of parked vehicles and saw what was happening, he threw himself into the middle of it, doing little harm but knocking Huff off balance enough that he fell and sprawled backward, striking his head on the bed of a pickup parked beside Floy’s car.
“Leave her alone!” Fate shouted as he jumped on Rodney’s back.
Rodney could have handled the boy with no trouble, but he wasn’t prepared for the dog. She didn’t make a sound until she bounded over Lutie, going for Rodney’s throat. A low growl came from deep inside the rottweiler as she began to shake Rodney like a cloth doll.
But when a man near the back of the car said, “Draco. Basta!” the dog let go of Rodney immediately, leaving him coughing and rubbing at his neck as he picked himself up. He and Huff backed off some twenty, thirty feet before they turned and ran, the sound of their feet slapping pavement growing fainter as they distanced themselves from the dog.
Fate watched until their attackers disappeared in the distance, then he turned toward the man who was approaching, a limping man with dark eyes and a rottweiler named Draco.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
DO NOT TO be ascared of me,” the limping man said. “I am Juan Vargas, your friend.” Silence. “You understand what it is I say?” Still too traumatized to speak, Fate nodded.
When Juan cut the engine fifteen minutes later, Fate pushed himself high enough to look over the seat in front of him, where he was met with a slobbery lick from the rottweiler, who occupied the passenger seat. But instead of seeing what he had expected to see—a hospital— he saw a modest house, dark inside and out.
He had a dozen questions for Juan Vargas, who had driven them there after finding the keys in Lutie’s purse, but he hadn’t asked them. Not once.
Lutie, still unconscious, had made no sound as she was lifted into the car by the man and the boy. Even with broken bones, torn muscles, and a damaged face—a face Fate could hardly recognize—she’d made no sound.
Fate, squeezed into the back floorboard to be near her, pulled off his T-shirt, wet it with a stale Coke from a three-day-old bottle, then—with great care—sponged her face and neck, hoping the cooling cloth would rouse her. She remained silent and unmoving. Watching the rise and fall of her chest, he knew she was still breathing, but she looked so small, so wounded, he feared she was near death.
Juan gave a one-word command to the dog, “Quédate!” then went to the door and knocked. Seconds later, a light came on near the back of the house, then the front, and finally on the porch. Within moments, a large man in a bathrobe came from the house and accompanied Juan to the car.
The porch light—one single yellow bulb—was so faint that Fate could not make out the features of either man as they lifted Lutie from the car, but as he followed them to the house, he studied Juan Vargas from the back. He was a powerfully built man from the waist up: broad shoulders, thick neck, muscular arms that bulged beneath his faded denim shirt, ripped near one elbow, stained with fresh blood.
In contrast, the lower half of his body looked thin, almost frail. His jeans, much too large for his frame, were held up by a leather belt with JUAN hand-tooled across the back, causing his pants to pucker around his small waist and thin hips.
Atop his long black hair, bound into a single braid that reached his waist, he wore a Panama hat, the brim tattered, the crown bent and soiled.
He was tall but looked even taller because of his Western boots, which Fate guessed to be made of snakeskin. The heel of the boot on his bad leg had been built up by an inch or so, most likely to lessen his limp, but when he walked, putting weight on that leg, his foot turned in so that with each step he took, he pitched sideways.
As Fate followed the trio inside, he saw a plaque over the door: “Dr. Hector Morales, M.D.”
The first two rooms they passed through, a living room and a dining room, looked ordinary except for several large framed circus posters decorating the walls.
As they passed a closed door in the dining room, the doctor called, “Rosa, te necesito.”
Fate heard a woman’s voice from the other side of the door: “Sí, ya voy. Un momento.”
At the back of the home, they entered what appeared to be a well-equipped doctor’s office—counters with bottles of various- colored liquids, cotton balls, bandages, trays of instruments, glass-fronted cabinets neatly arranged with medications, blood pressure cuffs hanging from hooks on the wall, X-ray equipment, an examination table . . . and more circus posters.
The doctor turned on a bright light, which illuminated the table and afforded Fate his first look at the face of the man called Juan Vargas.
His skin, the texture of leather, the color of rich brown tobacco, was a geography of lines that intersected like roadways on a map. His eyes were as dark as heartwood, and if what Floy often said was true, something about eyes being windows to the soul, then this man’s life was filled with sorrow born of regret and disappointment.
A scar through one of his heavy black eyebrows had turned the hair white along both sides of a fold of flesh used to close the wound. He had a thick mustache badly in need of trimming, and though his cheeks showed the stubble of several days’ growth, Fate could tell he had once, long ago, been a handsome man. But now, he was old. Perhaps, Fate thought, as old as thirty.
As the doctor, who had changed into a pair of white scrubs, was working his freshly washed hands into a pair of rubber gloves, a slight woman with white hair slipped into the office through a side door. One of her cheeks was still showing creases from the pillow she’d slept on, but her green eyes, nearly the color of her scrubs, were alert.
She and Juan exchanged greetings with the warmth of old friends who haven’t been in touch for a long time. After she washed her hands, she, too, put on rubber gloves. And as she approached the table, she noticed Fate for the first time, acknowledging him with a smile, a smile that quickly faded when she saw Lutie stretched out on the table. Involuntarily, she patted Lutie’s shoulder as she bowed her head in a short prayer before making the sign of the cross.
While the doctor began his examination of Lutie’s head where her hair was matted with blood, Rosa monitored the girl’s blood pressure and checked her heart rate. When she produced a clipboard with a form attached to it, she wrote down numbers as she repeated them in Spanish to her husband.
Fate was certain that such middle-of-the-night intrusions were common occurrences in that house—a child running a high fever, an elderly man gasping for breath, a mother of four with pneumonia, a teenager suffering a stab wound. And he was certain that no one was turned away.
The doctor adjusted one of the overhead lights, then leaned down to get a closer look at a deep gash running from Lutie’s jaw to her ear where dried blood had pooled. A knot nearly the size of an avocado seed appeared on her forehead just at her hairline, and one of her eyes, now the color of a plum, was swollen shut.
