Victor J. Banis

by Deadly Nightshade

  Peter Korski had survived the accident. Martha hadn’t. She’d been thrown from the car—her seat belt unfastened—crushed between the car and an ill-placed tree, an instant death. Better, at least, Stanley thought, then what had happened to his father—because, surely, Peter Korski had begun dying then as well, a process still not complete, agonizingly drawn out. Sometimes, Stanley thought he clung to life the way he did so he could suffer longer.

  He blamed himself, of course and, it seemed, in some odd way, he blamed his children, maybe for not being there, for not dying with her. Stanley had never understood it. Who could understand grief, grief laced with guilt? Whatever you did, whatever anyone did, it was almost certainly part of the fault, wasn’t it? The whole world, and everything in it, in his father’s eyes, had conspired to this awful fate that had befallen the woman they all loved.

  Stanley knew Irene, his sister, suffered more from it, maybe just because she was a woman—necessarily, now, the woman of the house, a role she hadn’t wanted, had no choice but to fill, and couldn’t help being the usurper in doing so. A girl might want to be her mother, might even on some level dream of taking her mother’s place. How could you not feel guilty when it happened like this? Did she ever, Stanley had wondered more than once, feel as if she had wished her mother’s death on her?

  Stanley, male like his father, had somehow been, like him, the loser, the living victim—until the day, that fateful day, when he’d told his father the truth about himself.

  It had been one of those conversations that had started out innocently enough. A teenaged Stanley had wanted to use the car. His father never drove it now except of sheer necessity. Probably, he blamed cars too, although this was a different one. He didn’t seem to mind, though, Stanley’s driving it.

  “Big date?” he’d asked, with a wink and a man-to-man kind of grin.

  “Sort of,” Stanley had said. Man-to-man had always made him uncomfortable, even when he’d been a little boy. Even then, he knew the difference. By now, he was practicing it.

  “Who is she? Anyone I know?”

  “It’s a he, actually,” Stanley said, thinking, with a mix of relief and terror, that he had been given the opening he had long been looking for, to broach the subject that he knew sooner or later had to be broached.

  “He? Big date? I hope you’re not turning queer on me, son.” A laugh that said, I don’t seriously think so, but it’s entered my thoughts a time or two, so put my mind at ease anyway, why don’t you?

  Followed by a long, long silence, so long that Stanley needn’t have bothered answering the question. The silence had done that for him.

  “Actually, Dad…”

  Up until then, from the time Mom had died, it had felt to Stanley like he and Irene were competing for Dad’s attention. Later, looking back on that period in their lives, Stanley had the impression that they had been so caught up in their interpersonal turmoil, they had all but forgotten to grieve for the woman who died.

  They mourned, but it was more like they mourned for themselves and not for her.

  After that, though, after Stanley had come out, Irene emerged as the clear winner in their unspoken competition for the most sympathy. His dad barely spoke to him again, hardly looked at him and then never with anything that might have been called affection.

  But Irene discovered boys about that time, maybe just a little earlier than one might have expected, a quick succession of them. She was forever rushing to meet one or the other of them, flying out the door as if she were in a big hurry to be away. They hardly saw her. Stanley thought his Dad blamed him for that, too, as if he were the one driving her away.

  The blame the senior Korski heaped upon his son wasn’t altogether personal, though. He hated Stanley for being queer. That part of it was intensely personal. The rest of it, all that blame he ladled out, that was like the mashed potatoes to accompany the overcooked turkey when they tried to pretend it was Thanksgiving.

  Everybody got a spoonful, wanted or not.

  It wasn’t only Stanley, either. He blamed everybody. For everything. That was when he started retreating inside himself. Stanley saw it happening, he wanted to do something about it. But his father no longer let Stanley get close. “Inside himself” was someplace in particular that Peter Korski wouldn’t let his son go. And if Irene noticed, any of this, she was too busy dashing out to be with those boys, to do anything.

  So, Irene won, but they all three lost, too. Victims of victims.

  § § § § §

  “You lost the sling,” Tom said when he saw him.

  “It must have fallen off,” Stanley said. Tom nodded, as if that made perfect sense. They didn’t speak again until they were in the car. The Petaluma streets were empty. It took no more than a minute or two to reach the freeway. There was nearly always traffic on the I-5—at this time of night, mostly the big rigs.

  “How’d it go?” Tom asked, fitting onto the interstate in the space between a couple of semis.

  “Fine,” Stanley said curtly.

  They drove the rest of the way in silence, the headlights piercing the night. Even the semis thinned out, till they had long stretches of the highway to themselves. The rain had stopped, the clouds lifting.

  Tom found an oldies station on the radio. Janis, The Doors. Even Credence: Proud Mary. Stanley listened the way you do with old songs that you know so well you forget whether it’s you or Dan Fogarty performing them.

  After a while, Stanley felt some of the anger and the pain begin to drain out of him. Oddly, the silence between him and Tom wasn’t awkward the way it had been in the beginning. He found it comforting; there was nothing angry or petulant about it. It was patient, understanding, one of those amicable silences that lets everyone settle into his own personal comfort zone before it asks anything of you.

  They were curving down the hill that led to the Golden Gate when Stanley said, “Thanks for taking me.

  I’d have been a mess by myself.”

  For an answer, Tom took the cut-off that led to the parking area at the end of the bridge. Posted signs warned that the area was closed after dark but Tom parked along the drive and put the SFPD sign in the window in case any highway patrol came along.

  “Come on,” he said to a surprised Stanley. “This is where I come when things are bugging me.”

  They walked out onto the bridge and paused by the railing. Tom took a joint out of his pocket, lit it, puffed and handed it to Stanley. Stanley hesitated for a moment. He rarely smoked. It tended to make him silly.

  Tom was watching him, though—weighing him, it looked like. Stanley took the joint, sucked in a big lungful of smoke, let it out slowly. Tom grunted. Stanley was glad after all that he had joined in. It was like they were bonding. The way cops did in the movies and books.

  It was the hour between night and dawn. Even now, the lights of the city were still bright, sparkling on the ripples of the bay. Far below, black against black, a ship slid slowly under the bridge. The sky above was washed clean, one huge cloud looking so full a pin might burst it, and a faint ghost of a moon still hovering overhead, pale, like silver that has been polished until it is worn thin.

  “‘A little silver slipper of a moon,’” Stanley said.

  “What?”

  “Oh, just a line from a play.”

  Tom looked searchingly at him. “You really like all that stuff, don’t you?”

  “Stuff?”

  “Plays, poetry—I’ll bet you like to hang out at art galleries.”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.” Stanley’s smile was a little embarrassed. “Too fruity for you, I guess.”

  They passed the joint back and forth. Tom considered Stanley’s remark for a moment. “No,” he said finally, actually looking up at the moon. “I don’t know any of that shit. I’m just a dumb cop. It’s kind of nice, to tell you the truth, knowing someone who does. I guess I could learn stuff from you.”

  “You’re not dumb,” Stanley said. Tom only grunted again.


  The sun was almost up now, hurrying before the night changed its mind, the gray sky enameled with streaks of bronze and amber, the famous skyline silhouetted against them. The ocean was dark gray and green, like the verdigris one sees on old brass, and the headlands in the distance were smoke purple, flecked here and there with a dusty gold, as if a painter had just daubed at them with his brush. There were those little flecks of gold everywhere, really—gold gray, gold green, gold purple. A pair of early rising gulls called to one another, celebrating the day to come, or maybe jeering their lay-a-bed cousins.

  Stanley had seen all this many times, but never before at this time, at this late night, early morning hour, and not from the bridge. It was a spectacular sight.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said.

  “I never get tired of it.” Tom flicked the roach over the railing, a wink of red as it disappeared, and did the one-handed thing with a stick of gum. “The bridge, the hills, all of it. I come here when I need to quiet my mind down. I guess it’s my kind of poetry.”

  Headlights brushed over them. A lone car, its windows down, went by headed for Marin, leaving little flecks of ‘Pretty Woman’ in its wake

  Stanley glanced at Tom then, and he had a sudden, almost frightened realization of Tom’s beauty. Oh, he’d known all along that he was good looking, sexy, hot—he just had not until now thought of the word

  “beauty” in connection with him.

  But he was, though, as beautiful as any museum statue or great painting. Not just handsome, which all at once Stanley found too inadequate a word for that dark nest of curls that was his hair, for those brown eyes that glinted sometimes with gold and could turn as dark as thunderclouds in an instant; for the full-lipped mouth—how he had loved kissing that, more than he would have dared admit—and the high cheekbones as if carved of marble. He felt his knees grow weak, and was unaware that he was staring until Tom glanced back at him, his expression puzzled.

  “What?” he said, chewing.

  Stanley felt something inside himself stir. He wanted to fling his arms about Tom, but he knew that he did not dare. He was afraid to speak, even, to shatter the spell. He took a tiny step closer, not quite close enough to touch, but close enough that he was sure he could feel the warmth of Tom’s body. It made his breath quicken, and he had to cough into his hand to disguise his arousal. He opened his mouth, fully meaning to say, “I love you.”

  What came out instead was, “I saw a flying saucer once. When I was twelve.” He immediately felt like an idiot. Flying saucers? Here, now, in this totally romantic moment? “I guess that sounds weird, huh?”

  Tom had to think about that. “Were you stoned?”

  “Kind of. Yeah.”

  “Well, then.” That seemed to settle the issue.

  “I was just thinking,” Stanley stammered, trying to think of something to redeem himself, and coming up blank. Shit. When it didn’t matter, he could chatter a mile a minute. He couldn’t think of a damned thing to say—not, certainly, any of what he had been thinking. “It’s getting cold, isn’t it?”

  Tom turned up the collar of his sport coat and stuffed his hands into its pockets. “Yeah. We’d better go.”

  They walked in silence. Stanley couldn’t decide if he felt more like laughing or crying. He had to restrain himself to keep from skipping like a schoolgirl. He’d never felt anything like this before, some kind of ecstasy new to his experience, part pot, maybe, part physical desire, and something more than either of those.

  But he felt like a moron, too. Who stood on the Golden Gate Bridge in the early morning light with the man he loved—never mind that it seemed to have happened all at once, who could direct the course of love?

  —stood on the Golden Gate Bridge in the early morning light and talked about flying saucers? Probably, he should have skipped right over the railing while he was there, tossed himself away like that roach, done one of his infamous swan dives.

  Only, he didn’t—couldn’t—feel as unhappy as he thought he ought to be. As he probably would be later when he did the replay.

  Not until they were in the car did he say, his voice carefully neutral, “Thanks. For sharing that with me.”

  Tom, fiddling with the ignition, looked sideways at him, and for a few seconds Stanley thought he was going to say something. Or, for the briefest moment, he looked as if he might lean across the seat, like he meant to take Stanley in his arms. But he only nodded his head and started the car.

  “What now?” Tom asked when they were across the bridge, merging with the already thickening morning traffic.

  “Now, bed,” Stanley said, and all of a sudden he yawned. To his surprise, Tom grinned and yawned too, and scratched at his crotch.

  “Yeah, good idea,” he said. “Tonight, the Boom Boom Room again? I still want to talk to Gaye Dawn.”

  “I’m starting to get jealous of her,” Stanley said.

  “Don’t be.”

  Now what did he mean by that, Stanley wondered?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It was raining again. They never mention that in the travel brochures, Stanley was thinking. Sometimes, in the winter season, it rained for days on end. And when it wasn’t raining, everything was sooted with fog, so that when the sun finally did make a brave appearance, you felt almost drunk on its glow.

  The Boom Boom Room was packed, the miniature tables crowded close together, men standing three and four deep at the bar, watching the performer on the stage. The hostess told them initially that there were no tables. Tom showed her his badge and she found them one, crammed into a tiny alcove at the rear. A single candle flickered on the table. Stanley ordered a coke, Tom a bourbon and water.

  “I thought we weren’t supposed to drink on duty,” Stanley said.

  Tom gave him a dismissive look. “That’s under normal circumstances. Sitting in a drag bar is not normal.”

  Their drinks came just as the lights dimmed and a gorgeous woman with a baritone voice announced “The star of The Boom Boom Room, Miss Gaye Dawn.”

  The house lights dimmed, a blue spot hit the stage, Gaye Dawn standing in it. Tom hadn’t seen her come onstage, although he had been watching for her. She seemed just to materialize. She was small—she looked smaller than he remembered her as a guy—wearing a dark blue dress that reached almost to the floor, high at the neck and slit on the sides, so that she flashed a lot of bare leg as she moved. Very nice leg, he had to concede. The whole package looked pretty good, really. If he hadn’t known it was a guy…

  She was good, too, he guessed. He wasn’t a show tunes kind of guy, but he had to admit, she not only looked utterly convincing, she sounded it too. The performer who’d been on stage when they came in had lip-synched a bit too obviously to a Donna Summer recording. Gaye Dawn, however, sang in her own voice, a kind of whisky baritone that nevertheless managed to sound genuinely womanish.

  “The song sounds familiar. Plus, she reminds me of someone,” he whispered to Stanley. “Her voice, I mean, the way she sings.”

  “It’s Lili Marlene,” Stanley said.

  “Never heard of her.”

  Stanley did one of those longsuffering sighs that always pissed the hell out of Tom. “The song is Lili Marlene, dope. It was one of Dietrich’s signature songs. You have heard of Dietrich, one hopes.”

  “Oh, sure.” Tom had once worked a case with a Noah Dietrich. He felt pretty sure that wasn’t who Stanley meant, but he wasn’t inclined to say so.

  He focused instead on the performance onstage. She had segued into something more upbeat, completely unfamiliar to him, about boys in back rooms. He wondered if that was a, what did they call them, an innuendo. Boys, back rooms? Probably it was, the way the audience was eating it up. Back door stuff, for sure. He smiled to himself, proud that he had worked it out without any of Stanley’s snide cracks.

  Gaye Dawn danced too—more a sashaying back and forth across the stage, a lot of shimmying of hips and bottom. A very convincing bottom, he couldn�
�t help but notice. Did drag queens wear padding there? He decided maybe he didn’t want to know. It looked real, anyway.

  She did three numbers, and a loudly enthusiastic audience convinced her to do a fourth before she curtseyed deeply, blew her admiring fans a series of kisses, and left the stage. This time, the spotlight went out, making it clear the performance was over.

  Acheson came to their table soon after she went off. “She’ll be here in a little while,” he said. “Half an hour, maybe forty minutes.”

  “How long does it take to change out of a dress?” Tom asked. He hadn’t planned on sitting there for the evening. He didn’t like some of the stares they were getting from the other patrons.

  Acheson gave him a scornful look. “It isn’t getting out of the dress that takes time, it’s taking off Gaye Dawn,” he said. “I suppose if you’re in a really big hurry, she’d let you come back and watch her undress.

  Maybe you could help her with her bra. She sometimes has trouble with the clasp.”

  “We’ll wait,” Tom said. “But tell him—”

  “Her. And I don’t tell Gaye anything at this stage,” Acheson interrupted him. “No one bothers her after a show, not for a half hour or more. Sometimes it takes a full hour for her to come down. It’s called artistic temperament.”

  “We’ll wait,” Stanley repeated. “Don’t get impatient, sugar.” He gave Tom’s arm a pat.

  § § § § §

  It felt funny, looking into the mirror and seeing, not Tanya’s long dark hair, but this shorter, reddish blonde do. Tanya was gone—not permanently, not dead, exactly, just gone for the present. The cops were looking for Tanya, whose hair hung all the way down her back and whose makeup was just a touch overdone. So, Tanya had taken a vacation of sorts. She’d come back when she was needed. When it was time for the real thing.

  The woman, this different woman in the mirror, smiled at her encouragingly. She smiled back. She hadn’t started out to become different people, only to be Tanya, to play a specific part, but she had found that she liked the power of transformation.