Gwen put her hands on my shoulders, pulled me into a rough hug as we stood by my car. “Thank you,” she whispered into my ear. I stepped away first.
“Give me your gun.” I held out my hand.
She hesitated, then pulled it out, emptied the bullets into her palm, and handed me the gun.
“And the bullets.”
“That was a good gun.” She dropped them into my hand. “I wouldn’t have shot if I hadn’t thought he’d had a gun.”
“I know.”
“I’ll be back by noon, one at the latest.”
I touched her once on the shoulder, then turned to Doris Whitehead, who’d been sitting in the boat quietly, waiting on us, and said, “We’re all set.”
Doris Whitehead turned on the engine, and we pulled away from the dock. I sat crossways in my seat, between Doris and Vince, and watched Gwen’s figure, barely distinguishable from the trees, until a bend in the river hid her from view.
I’d never been on a river this dark and remote at night. I could see the outlines of small buildings occasionally along the shore, but there didn’t seem to be anyone around or in them. The moon kept playing hide-and-seek between the clouds, and I heard splashing, fish I supposed, or perhaps alligators, once the flapping of some great bird off to the side; otherwise, it was quiet. About five minutes out, I slid Gwen’s gun out of my back pocket and held it over the edge of the boat, the water warm to the touch. I let the tug of the water pull it out of my hand.
I looked at the back of Vince’s head, his hands clenched tight in the cuffs. He squirmed some, but mostly he seemed to be waiting, his body one tense line, the breath coming through his nose in a soft, rapid wheeze.
Doris Whitehead moved the boat through increasingly smaller channels with confidence, and I was impressed at her adeptness doing this in the dark. Gwen and the others would never find their way out here. Doris Whitehead would have to go back to the marina midday and wait.
After about twenty minutes we pulled up to a dock that ran parallel to the shore for a considerable distance with a short, six-or seven-foot protrusion out into the water from the middle of it. Doris Whitehead cut the engine and tied us off to a narrow metal pole on the shorter dock, beside four rungs that led to the top. She gestured for me to get out first. I bent down and untied Vince’s legs, then quickly went up the rungs. Doris Whitehead pulled Vince to his feet. “Nothing funny, boy, there’s gators and moccasins all around. And I feed ’em regular like when I’m out here, so they’ll be ready to chomp hearin’ the engine,” she said.
He looked at the rungs and then up at me, the bandanna in his mouth stretching his cheek muscles into wide commas. I motioned to him, reached down, and grabbed him by the shoulders as Doris Whitehead kept a hand on his back, and we guided him up onto the dock.
When Doris Whitehead joined us, he balked, tried to say something. I hesitated, then reached to untie the bandanna. “Don’t,” Doris Whitehead said, but I ignored her, told him if he yelled no one would hear him and the bandanna wouldn’t come off again, and then pulled the cloth out of his mouth. He coughed several times, licked his lips, shifted his jaw back and forth. “Fuckin’ bitches,” he growled, and I reached up with the bandanna, but he pulled his head away, said, “Gotta piss.”
Doris Whitehead and I looked at each other.
“I’m not undoing these handcuffs,” I said.
“And I’m not gonna hold his thing,” she said. “Let him do it in his pants.”
“No.” I reached forward and unbuckled his pants, his eyes boring into mine, a slight smirk on his face. “I’m going to take you to the edge there, hold on to you, and you can do your business.” The smirk disappeared. I pulled his pants down around his ankles, then his underpants, dark green briefs. His penis was small and a bluish dusty rose, his balls shrunk up and shriveled in a mass of dark hair. A fetid odor drifted up off him. I turned him around, walked him to the edge, put one hand on the link between the handcuffs and the other on his shoulder. “You try anything, and I push you in,” I said. He squatted a little, his legs trembling, and we stood there until he’d finished.
He’d dribbled some on himself, and I stared at the dark patch between his legs, his penis dangling loose and damp against his skin. When I looked up at him, he must have seen something in my face because whatever he’d started to say he bit back, and his jaw tightened, his eyes shifted away from mine. I jerked his pants up, turning my head away as I did, buckled his belt, and grabbed him by the arm. “Let’s go,” I said to Doris Whitehead, and pushed Vince in front of me as we followed her up the dock and onto a dirt path that led several yards back into the dark woods.
Her cabin was larger than I’d expected, cleaner too. A good-sized bedroom led off the main room that functioned as living room, kitchen, and dining room. Three big armchairs and an old navy blue couch were crammed up against two walls, a table, refrigerator, and stove against the third. There were no pictures, no knickknacks. Doris Whitehead lit a kerosene lamp and then led us into the bedroom, where I had her hold the shotgun on Vince as I uncuffed him. He rubbed his wrists slowly, stretched his shoulders forward, his eyes following me carefully as I gestured for him to get on the bed. “What the fuck you bitches think you’re gonna do with me?” he said, but there was more fear in his voice now than anger, and I gestured again. He hesitated. I shoved him slightly, enough so he stumbled back and sat down heavily, the bedsprings squeaking. I cuffed his right wrist and attached it to the bed frame, then used the other set of cuffs on his left hand. Tied his feet back up again, replaced the bandanna, and propped the pillow up under his head so he could breathe more easily.
“I’ll make us some coffee,” Doris Whitehead said. She took the lamp back into the main room, and put it on the kitchen counter along with the shotgun.
Vince diminished to a gray outline with darker shadows cast by the angles of his body. He seemed not quite human—a black mirage, except for his eyes and the hard red slash of the bandanna.
“I find it fascinating, really, that you’ve never mentioned her. Your wife,” I said softly. He blinked once, pulled his right hand hard against the cuffs. “Never asked us a damn thing about why we were at your house.” I kept my face still, expressionless. “Curious, isn’t it?”
He muttered something into the bandanna, but I turned my back and left, keeping the bedroom door open, and moved an armchair so I had a direct view in. I could just see his outline on the bed.
“Black okay?” Doris Whitehead said, and I nodded.
While the water heated, she busied herself emptying the grocery sacks, putting food up into the cupboards and into the refrigerator, opening the shade partway over the kitchen sink. I watched Vince, and I watched her. She wore olive-colored cargo pants and a maroon T-shirt, the material stretched out tight across her breasts and the rolls of fat beneath. Her face looked like a Rottweiler’s, massive with jagged eyebrows, but watchful and steady too, the folds of flesh under her chin jiggling slightly. Not a pretty woman, I thought, probably never was. Needed a better haircut, something more flattering, less harsh. Looked home done.
When she moved to pull back the drapes on the far wall, I said, “No.” She stiffened a minute, then said, “Of course,” and closed them.
She turned on the ceiling fan overhead and then a large floor fan that rattled at the far end of every turn. I got up and turned it off, looked back at Doris Whitehead, who watched me stone-faced, and said, “Too noisy. I need to be able to hear him.”
“It’ll get hot in here by midday,” she said.
“Then it’ll get hot,” I replied, and settled back into the chair and studied Vince’s dusky outline again until bile rose up into my throat, abrupt and corrosive. I stood, said in a thick voice, “I’m stepping outside for a minute.”
I knelt on the dock at the edge opposite from the side Vince had used, waiting to throw up. Nothing came but acid coating my mouth. I spit and waited some more. I wanted to howl, just tear the sky open. But I kept taking dee
p breaths, and the nausea eventually passed. I looked at my hands, flexed my wrists. Water lapped softly against the wood, and I stuck a few fingers in; it was body temperature and smelled slightly metallic under the fish and wet clay odors. Then I remembered the alligators and jerked my fingers out.
The sky was huge. Away from the city, I could actually see the stars, a whole blanket of them playing peekaboo behind gauzy clouds. I lit a cigarette, studied the smoke wafting up through the air. There was no way on earth, I realized, I could kill Vince Durham or be a party to killing him. And there was no way on earth I could let him go. Those were two facts I could not reconcile.
After a while I returned to the house, stopped in the doorway of the bedroom, Vince’s eyes watching me. I looked away first, came back to the chair, and picked up the mug of coffee Doris Whitehead had placed on the floor beside it. She’d settled in the chair on the far wall, the shotgun within grabbing distance. The light from the kerosene lamp made her face softer, less grim.
I blew on the coffee, took a sip. The taste of chicory was so strong I struggled to swallow the first mouthful without wincing. “Thank you,” I said, and meant it, the bitterness running through my body, clearing out the numbness I’d felt since Gwen fired her gun. I slipped my gun out of its holster and tucked it in my lap, shifted my hips more comfortably into the chair.
Doris Whitehead cleared her throat, rubbed a thumb against her chin as though she were playing with a stray hair. “It’s different for you, isn’t it?”
“Ma’am?” I looked at her over the edge of my cup.
“From them other women. Some of ’em believe and some of ’em don’t so much, but you feel it more strongly, don’t you?”
“I’m not following you.”
“What you told me after you found her, that you do it gently. That’s not the way it is at all for you, is it?”
I stared at her openmouthed.
She smiled a little, settled back farther into her chair, put one foot up on a small stool. “I’ve been watching you, thinking about all you said the other day, how kind you were to Jeannette, to me, and I figure you’re leaning up against some mighty big doors inside, trying to keep ’em closed.” She took a sip of her coffee. “But you ain’t having much luck, are you?”
“Well, I think under the circumstances—” I started, my voice indignant.
She waved a hand across her face. “Nah, before, way before this. I can see it, right under your skin. Not like that friend of yours that shot the other fellow.”
“Gwen’s a good cop—”
“But you didn’t shoot him. She did. Now you’re wondering what to do with him, ain’t you?”
I took another swallow of coffee, tapped a finger against the rim of the mug.
“Not married, are you?”
I shook my head slightly, watching her warily.
She nodded, satisfied, but satisfied as to whether she’d gotten it right or satisfied I wasn’t married, I couldn’t tell. “Boyfriend?”
I thought of Ricky’s teasing smile, his hands moving quietly down my belly, between my legs. “Kind of,” I said, surprised to hear my response, surprised to realize that this was exactly how I thought of Ricky. Indefinite. Lovely in the moment, but not permanent. Just a kind of, something in between work and sleep. An antidote, like all my boyfriends had been. I’d just never admitted it to myself before. I fought back the sudden burn of tears.
She smiled at her feet. “Betcha got him confused half the time.”
I gripped my cup tighter. “I think everything is rather confusing right now, don’t you?” I spoke slowly, enunciating each syllable, like I did when talking to prisoners, explaining why they should tell me the truth about what had happened. I gave her the look too, the one that said, Let’s cut through all the bullshit. Sometimes this worked; sometimes it didn’t.
Doris Whitehead’s face ran through a lineup of emotions: blank, amused, grim, and finally something like acceptance floated up. “You like stories?”
“Ma’am?” I thought of my mother reading me Bambi and Peter Pan, then starting the Black Stallion series, a chapter each night, until I became impatient and learned to read on my own. I wished I hadn’t been in such a hurry now; I’d have liked more memories of her voice.
Doris Whitehead rubbed her hand hard against her ear. “I’m gonna tell you a story. Help pass the time. And we got lots of time together, you and me. And a course with him.” She smiled her tight-lipped smile, lips stretched across gums, and jerked her head toward the bedroom. “But this isn’t for him, it’s for you. Want some more coffee?”
She stood up and moved past me to the kitchen, taking my cup with her. I tucked my gun into the back of my jeans and went into the bedroom, checked the ropes around Vince’s legs, the gag in his mouth. His eyes were hard and tight. I couldn’t resist patting him on the head. His arms jerked hard against the cuffs, and he muttered something through the gag. “Good boy,” I whispered, unsettled at the equal mixture of venom and sadness I felt.
Doris Whitehead handed me my cup, full and hot. She leaned her head against the back of the chair, the skin under her chin almost taut, and started speaking slowly to the ceiling, so soft I had to concentrate to hear.
“Grew up in New Iberia, married just out a high school to a boy I’d known since I was three. Carl was a decent man. Didn’t talk much, but then we didn’t put much weight on talking back in those days. Surviving, that’s what we focused on. We worked hard, both of us. Lived with his parents for the first five years. I worked in a grocery store for a while, him working construction. When we’d enough saved, cutting corners here and there, putting a little bit away each month regular like, we bought the house in Baton Rouge. Didn’t look like that then, needed lots of fixing up. More opportunities, we figured, in a big city. We had dreams, see. Nothing big, just poor-people dreams. He kept working construction, following the jobs, and I worked in one a them plants across the river. Just like Jeannette.”
She stopped for a minute, took a sip of coffee, her eyes fixed on the far wall. “I started taking some classes during the day at the university, working night shifts, until I got my teacher’s certificate, started teaching math at the elementary school over in Brusly.” She smiled faintly. “Always liked math. Wrong answers and right answers. No in between.”
I nodded, thinking about my fondness for facts in the territory of gray that was my job, when the one big fact I was having a hard time accepting, or knowing what to do with, shifted in the bed, and there was a thud, the bedsprings squeaking loudly. I went to the door, then came back and sat down. “He’s fine,” I said.
“He’s a sumabitch,” she said.
“Yes.”
We were both quiet a minute before she started talking again. “We worked hard all our life, regular like, and never seemed to get ahead. Always bought thirdhand cars, shopped at the thrifty store, cut coupons. This camp, this was our dream. We both loved to fish, loved the river, loved the solitude. Sometimes it was almost enough, you know, having this place? Nothing here when we bought it. Built this whole thing together, Carl and me, with our own two hands. Never had no children, something wrong with one of us, but we never bothered to find out which of us it was. No reason to, I figured. But long hard days, scrimping and saving regular like. Took care of his parents until they died. What I’m trying to say,” she finally looked at me, and goose bumps popped up on my arms, “is for thirty-two years we lived paycheck to paycheck, and I worried how we were gonna end our days. You understand?”
I nodded.
She tucked her head back and looked at the wall again. “Three years ago I happened to open an envelope from the bank.” She went quiet again, and I started calculating the age she’d gotten married, years she’d been married, added the three years ago to come up with a rough total, and looked at her in disbelief. This woman I’d thought to be in her midsixties was at least a decade younger.
“Don’t know why I done that,” Doris Whitehead continued. “N
ot on that day with that envelope. Must a been fate, or,” she sputtered out a laugh, “the Lord decided I needed to wake up. Some angel watchin’ over me, or the devil pullin’ me up by my panties. Never been able to figure out which. Carl always handled the money, paid the bills, told me how much we had to live on for the month, handed over my allowance. That’s the way he was, said money was the man’s business and the home was the woman’s, even though I’d worked all my life and the last half of it with numbers. I just gave him my paycheck every month. I was a ninny.” She twisted her mouth up into a pout and blew a lip fart, the noise and gesture so unexpected I jumped a little and lukewarm coffee sloshed onto my leg.
“It was an accounting of our money,” Doris Whitehead said. “There was over a quarter million dollars in our savings account. Three hundred and forty-two thousand dollars.” She whispered the words as if she was seeing that statement all over again. “The man I’d slept with, seen naked and sick, the man I’d fed every night, the man I’d believed in every single day of my life, regular like, believed him that we were on the edge of poverty. He’d been sockin’ away money from his jobs, telling me he was making less than he was. The sumabitch.”
“My God,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
She looked at me, her eyes tight. “Yeah, that’s what he said. I’m so sorry, Doris. I didn’t realize I’d put that much aside, Doris. Please forgive me, Doris.”
“What was he going to do with all that money?”
“I didn’t bother to ask. What was the point? I woke up right quick then and there and divorced him, quit my job, and took half of what was in that savings account, along with the house and this camp and told him I never wanted to see his sorry ass again.”
“My God,” I said again, all the pieces falling into place. “No wonder you don’t think much of men.”
She came out of her chair so quickly that my hand went to my gun. “Damn it all, it don’t have nothin’ to do with men. Don’t fall into that trap, missy. None of what I been telling you has a damn thing to do with men, who they are, or who they aren’t. It’s to do with women. Hear me? With us. You and me and Jeannette and your friend doing all that shooting. All of us. Every woman that breathes on this earth and them that don’t anymore as well. It’s to do with knowing ourselves, not fooling ourselves, knowing what we’re capable of. Who we are in here,” she thumped on her chest, “and up here,” she said, tapping her temple. “Sheesh. You ain’t heard a word I said.” And she stomped out into the kitchen, slamming the pot hard against the stove and striking a match. The burner let out a loud whoosh.
Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You Page 21
