“So, Hector says that you are trying to get away from your husband?” she started.
“Yes,” Retta replied, still trying not to give away too much information about their plight.
“Hector said that you have a gun with you,” Pilar cocked her head sideways.
“Yes, but it’s not loaded.”
“Well, while you’re here, if you want to stay, I need to keep it. You understand, right?” Pilar looked serious, like this was a request she expressed often.
Retta nodded her head. Looking around, she saw a painting of the Madonna on the wall and several unlit candles sitting along a window sill. The floor consisted of wooden slats with no carpets anywhere. The furniture was old and worn, like years of small children had taken the once colorful fabric out to play in the desert for good.
“Is this your home?” Retta asked Pilar, at last feeling a bit more comfortable.
“Yes, it is. I live here with my mother. She is in failing health and sleeping in her room.”
Retta sighed, thinking of her own mother, living all alone up in New Jersey with no desire to leave. Who would take care of her when she was old? Frank. Who would tell her that she was gone? Frank. That she would never get to meet her only grandchild in person? Frank.
Buddy shifted in his seat. He was tired and not quite sure he understood everything that was going on around him. This Pilar woman stunk of chicken grease, but she was being real nice to them and might help them find their way to a new place, somewhere far away from Kenny.
“We have a quiet system in place here in the southwest, but it’s usually to help Mexican women fleeing their homes and trying to find a better life in the states. We help women who are already over here, too. I have a small place where I house some of them and their children until we can get them some papers and set up with jobs or a plan to go far away and start over.”
“What are they fleeing?” Retta asked, her gut already knowing the answer.
Pilar grinned at her. “I think, the same thing as you.” She leaned back in her chair, her doughy arms sinking on the arm rest. “My people suffer the same things as your people, only in a different language and culture. Mexico is violent and has more poverty than over on this side of the border. Both of those things together is a dangerous combination for a woman with no options. As you know, it’s a man’s world – but it’s even more of a man’s world in some parts of Mexico. Women are merely things to produce children, cook and clean and suffer the whims of her man. And many of the men are not happy, so they take it out on their women. Some men are like Hector. They are kind and do the best they can. But many are not.”
The bruises on Retta’s arms and forehead hurt, and she could feel the cut on her eye stinging at the mention of battered women.
“He wasn’t always like this,” she confessed to Pilar, her voice starting to crack. “He was so nice to me at first. It was…later…something changed.”
Retta could feel the tears swell up in her eyes, her images of Kenny before the alcohol took hold of him like an anchor around his neck, before the night terrors tormented him throughout his waking days and sleepless nights, before he lost his job because his co-workers complained about his inability to control his temper, before he became obsessed with finding someone named Han.
“You don’t have to tell me about it, miss. It was bad enough that you needed to run away and sell your car to Hector.”
“He was a mean son of a bitch and I’m glad he’s gone,” Buddy stated, flatly.
Retta’s head jerked toward him. “Buddy, you keep quiet.”
Buddy sat back into the couch, his body sinking deep into the cushion. Retta wanted to ask him what he remembered, but she was so scared of what Pilar would think now that he blurted that out loud about Kenny.
“You are both welcome to stay in the place that I have for my women. I have people who help me get papers and will help you get new papers if you want. I can get you set up with a job around here and help put the boy in school or he can stay out of school for a while, until you’re settled somewhere. Is there no one else who can help you?”
Retta, with her head down, nodded gently. “We have nowhere to go. We have no family left.”
It was a lie, but it was a good lie.
Coma
There was a constant beeping noise and the faint sound of something hissing off in the corner near a window. A woman with honey blond hair pinned up with a clip and wearing a white nurse’s uniform kept coming in and out of the room. Sometimes, she had a clipboard in her hands, and other times she had nothing. She would look down at me, scribble something on the piece of paper, read squiggly lines and numbers on the loud machine, and then she’d sigh.
I looked down and could see myself sleeping. It had to be sleep. If I was dead, I would be in a drawer inside of a morgue instead, I figured.
There were tubes coming out of my mouth, a white blanket covered me all the way up to my chin, and I could see my socks poking out from the bottom. They put a white knit cap on my head like I’d be leaving any minute to go downhill skiing up in West Virginia.
All I could figure out is that I had been shot by someone. Not sure how many times. I don’t know where Retta and Buddy were. No one I knew had ever come into this hospital room to check on me. I don’t know how anyone knew to come inside the house and get me out. I never saw Retta come out of our bedroom, or Buddy either, and no one came into the house and saw me lying on the floor, that I knew of.
I had no idea how long it had been since I was shot and no idea how much time had passed since I was on the floor, my head propped up by the sink cabinet. All I knew was that at some point, three people stormed into the house and took me away in an ambulance. The youngest one, a fresh-faced boy no older than my little brother when he got popped in ‘Nam, kept trying to wake me up.
“Kenny! Wake up! Do you hear me?” he would drone over and over and over in a blurry, drowsy southern accent. A couple times, he got rough with my face, but I couldn’t feel it. But I knew that I wanted to punch him for getting in my face like that.
I kept hollering at him, “I’m here! I’ve been shot! Please find my wife and son! Please! See if they’re okay!” But he never responded to any of it. He just kept telling me to wake up. The other two worked on the hole in my chest and apparently the one in my head, too, and then carted me out on a gurney.
It’s strange watching yourself be lifted and rolled out and then lifted again and then switched to a bed and then stripped of your clothing by an old woman who looked like she could’ve doubled as Glenda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz. It’s an odd experience yelling to a room full of people who are performing surgery on you and none of them hear you and you can’t feel the scalpel digging into your chest…but you can see it clearly. And you want it all to stop.
Time stands still. I’ve lost track of it all. I can’t go back to before all of this happened and I can’t go forward, on to Heaven – or probably in my case, considering what I had done and what I had failed to do as a man – Hell. I’m just stuck, in my own kind of hell, and I’ve never felt so alone in my life.
“Gee Eye,” I heard a small voice say.
It wasn’t a voice in the room. It was a voice from somewhere else but still close. Close by me. In me. Near me?
“Gee Eye,” it said again. It was quiet but song-like.
“Who’s there?” I shouted. “Can you hear me?”
“Gee Eye, you come now,” the voice sang, closer, closing in on me like a choking smoke.
I saw nothing else around me. Nothing near my body but the beeping machine. A chair was off alone in the corner, untouched. No one sat in it, no one was keeping watch over me here in this white, clean and sanitized room.
Putting my hands over my ears, I heard the voice again, softly whisper as if it was in my own space, “Gee Eye, come.” All I could make out – not in fron
t of me or behind me but almost like within me – was a shadow of a child’s head, her hair dark as the starless night and silky smooth. Why was this child telling me to come? Who or what was Gee Eye?
Chapter 4
August – October 1996
Joe’s Party
Buddy opened his eyes and noticed that it was still dark. There was a touch of moonlight shining through the top of a white curtain rod, which was resting just above his head. Where was he? This was not a familiar place.
He rolled slightly onto his back and felt a body next to his legs. It stirred. He turned his head and saw a huge crop of blond hair sprawled out from a comforter, consuming at least a pillow and a half. And suddenly, the stench of his sins smacked him in the face like a splash of cold water. He had a one-night stand with Jennifer the Carolina Law student, on loan from Columbia? Cornell? Fordham? Buddy couldn’t remember. He heard almost nothing she had yammered about for the entire night.
His mother’s birthday party for Joe had been loud, considering most of the attendees were either collecting social security or soon approaching it. Maybe it was loud because so many of them couldn’t hear on the best of days. Anyway, nothing Jennifer told him seemed all that interesting when he could actually hear her speak. And because she was so pretty and he was so shy, why would he even bother to ask her to repeat herself, or holler about it, or go somewhere private in the house so they could have a real conversation?
The only thing that seemed worth asking her to repeat was when she suggested that he come back to her apartment for some peace and quiet and to get to know each other better. She’d been sending Buddy the “I want you” eyes all night. While Buddy wasn’t really all that interested in getting to know her, other than maybe in a Biblical way, women rarely sent him such signals as far as he could tell.
The last time he had an actual sexual encounter, the OJ trial was still going on. It was with a court reporter who had just gone through an awful divorce, and for some reason, started talking to Buddy at the sandwich shop next to the courthouse one afternoon, crying in her Diet Pepsi, and requesting that Buddy rid her of her crippling depression with a passionate roll in the hay. She was in her late thirties, very pretty and knew exactly what she wanted from him. Since he had nothing else going on relationship-wise, he thought maybe he could have some fun and learn a thing or two from her. After all, Buddy had been well advised by a well-meaning client that women approaching forty knew what they want and how to ask for it, unlike the younger women who were still “trying to find themselves.”
They had an active physical relationship in her bed for about half a year before she met her “soulmate” – a high ranking officer in the Army who was closer to her age and moving to Germany. So, the fun was over for young Buddy. Court reporter went to Germany. Buddy went home to Bo.
Jennifer was a beautiful girl, well-mannered, well-groomed, and thin. She was young, intelligent, headed for success, and her skin was that tone between too pale and porcelain. But he had never really been the kind of guy who went home with women he just met, and he was certain that he’d never been “picked up” at a party before. Part of that had to do with the fact that he had no game whatsoever. Part of that had to do with trying to be a gentleman regardless of what his natural instincts wanted. He never had a one night stand before, not even in college, not even in law school, not even with the chubby girl from Canada who hung all over him while he was in Jamaica for Spring Break.
But after he had a few beers, and then after he had that odd tasting drink that Smitty Smith made for him in the kitchen, which included some kind of fruit juice and some kind of soda and some kind of moonshine and some kind of super secret magic potion from Smitty’s grandmother’s barn, Buddy lightened up a little and started white-man-overbite dancing with Jennifer during the Eighties music portion of the evening. She was holding onto him tightly the whole time, and before he knew it, they were making out in the hallway outside of the downstairs bathroom like two horny felons finally out on parole.
He didn’t recall eating some of Joe’s birthday cake or the barbecue or even getting back to Jennifer’s apartment, but he knew his car still had to be sitting along Joe’s driveway. How embarrassing would that be – getting Jennifer to drop him off at his car at his mother’s home –like a teenager who had been out all night and got caught? Of course, his mother would probably be standing on the porch, waving, giving him a thumbs-up and maybe even applauding. She might even go as far to invite the high school marching band over to play a fight song for him as he walked up the side of the house toward his car.
Buddy rolled out of Jennifer’s bed and stumbled into her bathroom. He turned on the light. It was neat and smelled like fresh fruit, that undeniable scent of high maintenance women with good pedigrees. The shower curtain was pink, and she had a fluffy carpet on the floor with a drawing of a cat on it. Her toothbrush and toothpaste sat in a pink plastic cup on the sink. A pink towel hung on the small rack. Buddy opened her medicine cabinet and took a look at what she had inside. You can tell a lot about a person by what they have in their medicine cabinet.
Aspirin, a box of Band Aids, Chap Stick, and some KY Jelly. A tube of something for women’s issues. A small bottle of mouthwash. Cough syrup. Some generic pills for cramps. Ibuprofen. Basically, nothing offensive or secret exposing at all. Jennifer seemed like a normal, nice girl with ambition and a sexy body. So why didn’t Buddy like her all that much? And why, if he didn’t like her all that much, did he go back to her apartment? Was he really that hard up? Has he turned into that guy now? No. Buddy reckoned that he was indeed that hard up and had been that drunk. Never a good combination.
Since Buddy wasn’t the proverbial douche bag, he cleaned himself up and got back into the bed with Jennifer. He figured that when she woke up, he would make her some breakfast and apologize for his behavior. She might not care, but he had to at least explain himself. He didn’t want to come across as that guy who gets his piece of ass and then never calls. He was a gentleman, or, at least wanted to behave like one during his one-night stand.
As he slid under the covers, Jennifer rolled a bit to the side and turned her head.
“You’re still here?” she asked, voice parched and cracked.
Buddy put his hand on her bare waist and moved himself closer to her, his chest along her side.
“Yeah, did you expect me to be gone?”
She turned her head back around. “No, you’re one of the good ones.”
Well damn. Buddy knew that this wouldn’t be easy. He didn’t want to have sex with her and then run away into the night because that would be a shitty thing to do. Lots of guys do stuff like that, and he never wanted to be one of them. But he also wasn’t really interested in getting to know her or developing any kind of relationship, no matter how attractive she was.
Which was worse? Cutting and running or pretending to be interested and stringing someone along?
Maybe he wasn’t being fair. Maybe she was a great fit and they needed more time to get to know each other. After all, it was a loud party with a bit too much booze and not a normal date where you have adult conversation. Maybe he should ask her out on a real date.
Jennifer turned herself toward Buddy and put her body against his. She started kissing him gently, like you do first thing in the morning, warming up to what could be. Buddy kissed her back, forgetting all the thoughts going through his head, and allowing his guy brain – that thing dangling between his legs – to take over.
They kissed like two new lovers this time, not like two goofy drunks with no inhibitions. There was passion, but quiet and in control, purposeful and explorative, full of the kind of energy two lonely people release onto each other. Jennifer moved along his body with her hands and eventually placed him inside of her, the sun rising to a new day.
Grandfather Mountain
On a beautiful Sunday in early October, Buddy and Jennifer par
ked the Pontiac and hiked their way up to the top of Grandfather Mountain in Blowing Rock. The plan for the day was to enjoy the spectacular views of the peaking Autumn foliage adorning the Blue Ridge Parkway as well as the mountain vistas provided by Mother Nature this time of year, have lunch at the Daniel Boone Inn in the charming college town of Boone, and then drive back to Chapel Hill before it got too late. Jennifer had a huge assignment due in her Professional Responsibility class the next day, and she needed to get back at a decent hour to finish the last part of it. The research was completed at the law library on Thursday and Friday nights, and both questions were started; however, the weekend away had been much needed for them both.
Buddy had found that he liked Jennifer enough to see her on a regular basis. Okay, who was he kidding? He saw her just about every day. He referred to her as his girlfriend, even though they never talked about such labels or exclusivity. He wasn’t sure yet if it was her specifically he liked – or the promise of so much great sex, as if there were such a thing as bad sex, with a girl who looked like Jennifer.
He never realized that any girl would want to have sex with him so much – he always figured that he didn’t offer that much in the good lovin’ department. Not because he was incapable of it but more so because he got so nervous around women and never had the right thing to say. And he couldn’t fake it like some guys can. He couldn’t play it off like some adorable personality trait, endearing himself to the, “Aww, he’s so shy and cute,” crowd of young females.
He always thought that maybe it would take a special girl to bring out all that he was capable of emotionally. Jennifer wasn’t necessarily that girl. To be honest, he liked her enough, but he didn’t see himself ever really loving her and knew deep down that this relationship was not going to last forever. But she had brought out things in him that he never knew were there before, and while he’d never admit it to anyone, she taught him a lot. And he enjoyed learning what she knew. He also enjoyed her company, having someone to talk to, and someone to do things with.
Good Buddy Page 5
