by Susanne Beck
"Best thing is to sit tight. I know that’s difficult, since I gather you’ve left the ranch already. But coming anywhere near Pittsburgh is a very, very bad idea. Those men want Cavallo, and they don’t much care how they get him. He’s government enemy number one around here."
I choked out a laugh. "And we’re pretty much in there at two and three, aren’t we."
"With a bullet, I’m afraid."
"Your choice of similes leaves a lot to be desired, Donita."
She hissed through her teeth. "Sorry."
"It’s alright," I replied, feeling a headache gather behind my eyes. The queasy kind that makes your guts roll and your head spin. "So, we’re just supposed to what…drive around in circles until somebody either catches us or figures out what to do with us? Is there anybody in the government on our side anymore?"
I knew I was whining, but I couldn’t seem to help it.
"Yes, Angel, there are. The good guys want Cavallo just as bad as the bad guys. And they’re doing their best to make that happen, but it’s a very uphill battle, I’m afraid. They’re fighting against an entire mountain of state politics and a good ol’ boy network the size of China. And you know how quickly the wheels of bureaucracy turn."
"Like maple syrup in a Vermont winter."
"Just about." It was her turn to sigh. "I’m sorry. I’m supposed to be your lawyer and your friend, and I’m doing a piss poor job at both."
"No you’re not, Donita. We’re all just in a bad spot here. We’ll just keep...um...driving around till you let us know what’s going on, ok?"
"Yeah, ok." She sounded dejected, but then her voice brightened. "One somewhat bright spot, though. If this all continues to turn sour, just dump Cavallo off in the nearest trash-bin and head west. I have a few friends there who will keep you safe. They used to do work for the Witness Protection Program, and believe me when I tell you, they’re in the habit of making some very famous people disappear."
"Not permanently, I hope."
She laughed. "Well, not in the way you’re thinking, no. So, just sit tight, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I know anything. I’m just about to wake the Lieutenant Governor out of his date with the blonde-who-isn’t-his-wife he had dinner with this evening. Wish me luck."
"Good luck."
"You too, Angel. Tell Ice I said ‘hi’, ok?"
"I will."
"Night, Angel."
"Night, Donita."
As I closed the phone with a dejected snap, Ice removed her hand from mine and took it from me. Laying it down in the space between the seats, she then gathered me into her arms as best she could, and rested my head against her shoulder. "It’ll be alright, Angel," she whispered, kissing my temple. "I promise."
And because it was Ice, and because I love her and trust her more than I ever thought it was possible to love and trust another person, I did what my heart told me to do.
I believed.
* * *
Whoever said that life is just one big series of giant circles was right on the money.
There’s nothing else I can think of that comes close to explaining why, nearly three years to the day later, I’m sitting in a hotel room very much like the one I went to with Ice on the day of my release from prison, writing on a pad of paper cheap and grainy enough to be from the same tree, and waiting to dash off somewhere yet again just one step ahead of the police.
It’s almost as if the intervening three years between that event and this were just some hallucinogenic or fever inspired dream I couldn’t wake up from.
But the difference in my body and the new lines on my face tell a story all their own and, personally, I’m glad it wasn’t all just a dream, since there were definitely huge parts of it I’m glad I was there to experience in the flesh, as it were.
It’s been twenty-four hours since the conversation with Donita that I related here. Twenty four hours of mostly bad news.
It didn’t start off that way, of course. It never does.
Donita had managed to get a hold of the Lieutenant Governor, apparently our one powerful ally in all this. He didn’t seem to mind overmuch getting yanked out of his tete-a-tete with his latest blonde du jour and agreed to help as best he could.
Things moved swiftly throughout the morning, and I could feel an expectant hope bubble up within me. Even Ice seemed to pick up the mood of the day, and her eyes held a sparkle I hadn’t seen in a long while.
But the eleventh hour, in this case noon, changed all that when the Lieutenant Governor ran up against a group of men with much bigger axes to grind, and so quickly lost the will to fight.
Like Cinderella’s ball gown, our hopes for a peaceful resolution faded away into nothingness and left tattered rags in its place.
Ice happened to field that particular call, and needless to say, our cell phone is now history, may it rest in pieces.
It was then that she decided to take matters into her own hands.
And so we wound up here, on the outskirts of a large, midwestern metropolitan airport, in a small, seedy hotel run by some friends of hers. Friends with heavy beards, crooked noses, and bodies that looked like they could stop a speeding train without breaking into a sweat. Friends who took the description "shady character" and made it into somewhat of an art form. And friends that Ice could, and did, trust with her life. And mine as well.
Cavallo’s here too, kept in a separate room, and being watched over constantly by the largest of the bunch. A true bully, our captive turned belly up the very second he set his eyes on his new keeper. I haven’t heard a peep from him since, which is just as well, since I have a headache that could drop a raging bull.
We argued bitterly today. For hours, it seemed. So bitterly that I must confess to a tiny thrill of fear seeping into my soul as I watched her eyes, silver and glittering with rage, set upon me. It was only for an instant, but in that instant, I felt what her victims must have felt when staring into those same glowing eyes. And it frightened me. Then she walked away and left me all but trembling in her wake.
We were arguing about her plan, of course, and my part in it. Which was to say, none.
She wanted me far away from here, from her. From danger. The city was large, she said, and her friends would help me blend into it. We had money, lots of it thanks to Corinne, and I could set myself up nicely as the events around us unfolded. I’d be safe, she said. And free.
And, of course, I bought none of it.
We got into this together, and we are going to get out of it together, or not at all.
I can be as stubborn as a two headed mule when I put my mind to it. And this time, my mind was very much ‘to’ it. I wasn’t about to be swayed. Not by her pleas. Not by her rage.
It is my right to stand by her side. I’ve earned it. And I’m not about to give it up.
In the end, as I’ve said, she walked away, her anger following her like a roiling thundercloud. She returned an hour or two ago, and though her anger was still there, her mood had mellowed to one of quiet resignation.
She sleeps now, but it isn’t a peaceful one. She tosses and turns, and at times, reaches out for me.
And though every fiber of my being aches to join her on that narrow bed, I don’t. Because I know, sure as the sun rises in the east, that if I give into my impulses, I’ll wake up alone in the morning and she’ll be far, far away.
And I’m not about to let that happen.
And so here I sit, drinking cup after cup of wretched coffee, and wile away the hours writing and watching my lover in her fitful sleep, and pray that this plan brings us the peace we both so desperately need.
Her friends have leant us a car. A car so bland that it could blend in with vanilla pudding and no one would be the wiser. That car will be our means of escape.
Cavallo will be transported by another friend, trussed up and drugged in the back of the jeep, to a spot in the airport’s long-term parking area. When the time is right, that friend will place a call to Donita with Cavall
o’s location, and the chase will be on.
If there’s any justice in the world, Donita and the good guys will find him first.
I doubt that will happen, though.
As for us, we’ll be on our way to Donita’s safe house in our bland little car.
I just hope to God we make it.
* * *
It’s rather amusing, the things that people say when they think you can’t hear them. I’ve often thought of explaining to the women around me that just because I choose not to speak doesn’t mean that I can’t hear, or listen, or feel.
I’ve never followed through on that, however. After all, what would be the point? Would it lessen the pity in their eyes when they look at me? Would it turn their thoughts and words to more pleasant things?
I don’t bear them any ill will, in any event. They’re young, and filled with life. Grief, for them, burns fast and hot, like a flash fire, and is quickly gone, forgotten beneath the exciting weight of the life they’re busy living.
My grief lingers, an old enemy come home to roost. It has been with me so long that some days it seems more cherished friend than bitter adversary.
My true friends have all gone, and like the strangers they’ve left in their places, I bear them no ill will. They have jobs to do, and people who need them. The world continues to turn, after all, no matter how much we sometimes wish it wouldn’t.
They asked, one might even say ‘begged’, me to accompany them, but the thought of spending the coming winter in a place so desolate and so cold outweighs my desire to have them close around me.
Only Nia has remained behind. She’s blossomed into a kind, compassionate woman whose beauty shines brightly from the inside, as it was meant to. She endures my long, morose silences with nary a complaint, and helps tend to the few needs I have. Sometimes I despair of what I perceive to be her wasted and wasting life, but she is quick to smile and reassure me that, right now, there’s no place she’d rather be.
Perhaps it’s a time, and a place, of healing for us both.
They say that the young live for the future, and the old live for the past. And while once I might have fought anyone with the temerity to actually spout that drivel to me, now I see those words for truth, and accept that truth as my own.
While I might have more things to live for, if you can truly call this living, memories seem to be the only things I want to live for.
And memories I have, both in my head where they play constantly like a film I don’t have to pay money to see, and in the stacks of journals and scrapbooks which take up constant, and reassuring, residence at my side. Though I’ve left the prison library far behind me, it appears my affinity for all things readable has followed me patiently, simply waiting for a time that I was still and quiet enough to realize it.
The journals I’ve read and reread and reread until the words themselves have taken up residence in my brain. I’ve memorized them all, I think, several times over. But if there’s one good thing to be had by living as long as I have, memory isn’t exactly what it used to be. At least short term.
Which means that every time I open one of those precious books, I see the words before me again, as fresh and as exciting and as new as when I first set eyes on them, a little more than a year ago. A small joy perhaps, but in a life filled with anything but, it’s a joy I take and hold to me with all the selfishness of a young child asked to share his toys with a stranger.
The scrapbooks I’ve read and reread as well, but they bring me no joy, and in that I am very thankful that my mind tends to lose hold of the images presented within rather quickly.
For the scrapbooks pick up where the journals leave off, chronicling the last journey of the two women I love most in the world, the women who took my heart and spirit with them when they left, and have never returned it.
They almost made it, you see. Almost, being the operative word. And deep within this rotting blackness I sometimes call a heart, there lives a tiny glimmer of hope that they did, in fact, make it, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
The others don’t share that hope, and I’m hardly in the position to case aspersions upon them for that. It’s not as if I don’t sound crazy, even to my own mind.
But the elderly have some immunity when it comes to off-the-norm thoughts. It’s expected of us, so rather than a shot of Thorazine and lovely men in pristine white coats, I only need suffer the slight indignity of pitied glances and thoughtless words.
I suppose, for one to get the full effect, I should start at the beginning, or at least as close to the beginning as I am able to get. Donita has been kind enough to fill in some of the massive holes left behind, but most of what I know is spread out before me in lines of newspaper ink much too small for my aging eyes to easily comprehend, even with the benefit of the glasses I’ve been cursed to wear since I was much younger and more sprightly of form and face.
The drop was made as planned, and Donita received her phone call. There was a jet, fueled and ready, and a freshly minted court-order she’d managed to pull out of her bag of tricks, along with the state prosecutor who’d originally penned the deal (and hadn’t been one lick of help since) as well as two sworn officers of the court who were charged with taking Cavallo into custody.
Somewhere along the way, however, a leak developed, and the FBI jumped in on the case before Donita’s plane had even left the runway. Because they have agents in almost every state, the FBI had a tremendous advantage over Donita.
The only information they didn’t possess, it seemed, was the make of the car Cavallo was held in. That was one thing Donita had sense enough to keep all to herself, and it quite probably saved his life.
The FBI was already searching the lot when Donita’s cavalry came over the hill, so to speak, and I imagine the scene at that time somewhat resembled one of those horrid game shows where the contestants debase themselves by rushing up and down supermarket aisles in search of a certain, big money, product.
The payoff in this case, however, would either make or break the fools in the statehouse who call themselves a government.
I’m told that Donita and the FBI arrived at the holding spot at very much the same time. And perhaps the fight for custody of one simple, if inherently evil, man would have been much fiercer if not for one very large Ace the lawyer held up her sleeve.
The press.
In my scrapbook, there is a picture in grainy news ink which shows Donita holding up her court order for all to see. A triumphant grin is plastered all over her lovely features. She really is quite fetching in her guise of Avenging Angel, and I’ve told her so, once or twice over the years. Off to the side in the same picture stand several very angry looking men, the bulges in their coats a testament to the heavy firepower they are carrying.
The copy below tells the story very briefly and very succinctly. Donita got her man. The FBI was left empty-handed.
And that should have been the conclusion to this sordid little tale. But it wasn’t.
Government agents detest being played for fools, and if they can’t take their frustrations out on the guilty, the innocent will do nicely in their stead.
With Cavallo caught and hauled away, there was no reason to continue to chase after Ice and Angel. But continue they did, determined to exact their pound of flesh in whatever way they deemed necessary. That it had stopped being necessary the minute Cavallo was arrested may well have entered into their minds, but it never stayed their hands. Off they went on another chase, one they determined would not end without bearing fruit.
Donita knew none of this, but I don’t have it within my heart to blame her for her uncustomary lapse of judgement, though not a day goes by when she doesn’t lay that blame upon herself.
The court order had called off the hounds. As is sometimes the way with curs, they turned a deaf ear to their master and continued on the chase, unabated.
No one will ever know with certainty whether or not Ice felt the loop of the dragnet begin to
close about her neck. I believe that she did. For it is my steadfast tenet that Ice is, at heart, a feral, wild creature who lives bound to instincts most of us who embrace the so-called civilizing influences cannot begin to comprehend. Such a creature seems, with preternatural senses, to know when danger is closing in.
Perhaps it was that sense of unseen danger, or perhaps it was just a desire to travel a less beaten path, but something made her choose to turn off of a well traveled highway and onto an almost deserted forest road.
Several witnesses, for there were witnesses, stated that the driver of the log truck coming in the opposite direction had been driving erratically for miles. One of the men who had passed him earlier stated that he saw the driver red-faced and clutching at his chest. Based upon this one report, the coroner concluded that the driver’s cause of death was a heart attack. Not enough of the man has ever been found to challenge that diagnosis.
By far the best witness was a young woman, fresh out of college, who had stopped by the side of the road in an attempt to change a flat tire. She never saw the truck coming straight for her, she reported. Never even knew of the immanent danger until an off-white car on her side of the road came, as she says, "charging forward", and a young blonde woman fitting Angel’s description exactly screamed at her to run.
She was only able to jump a short distance away before the log truck collided with the front left of the white car, dragging them both down a long, grassy hill. The rear bumper of the car hit the young woman’s leg, breaking it, but doubtless saving her life in the process. As she rolled from the impact, she was able to see the very tops of both car and truck as they teetered for a long moment at the edge of a ravine. Then they toppled over and dropped, I’m told, more than fifty feet to the bolder-strewn ground below.
Both vehicles exploded on impact, which started a small forest fire that took several hours to contain.
There wasn’t much of anything left when the police came to look for survivors.
We didn’t hear of the news until three days later, and the memory of that phone call sits etched indelibly within this capricious brain of mine. Though my descriptive abilities certainly pale in comparison to Angel’s aptitude with words, I can only state that if Stonehenge had been given form and face, it would resemble almost exactly the tableau in the living room as Montana ended the call from Donita.
