Criminals (25 page)

“That may be, Meghan,” Angie said, “but she was a little bit duped, if I'm not mistaken. And I can guarantee you he won't be killed. He'll stay right here until we're sure.” Sure of what? What could they manage for this boy? And Pat was getting back at noon. But she, Angie, was the mother. She was not afraid of Pat. “And now, and I mean this, you're all going back to bed.”

As Cham stood ready to push the buttons on the panel there was a knock on the door. “Hold it!” Angie got herself off the bench before Cham could take any action. “Great, now we have the police force again.” But when she opened the door, it was Wells.

“I'm back,” he said, walking straight in. “I'm thinking, wait a minute, you don't wanna leave the fox in with the chickens.” At the same time he held his hands up to indicate some possible compromise. But Jonah had already ducked into a dive against the man's belly. “God—damn!” Wells hollered, catching at the bench but going down, sitting hard on his haunch and ankle with one leg out. Angie heard the bent knee crack. From the floor he grabbed Jonah's pants leg and yanked until the boy fell on top of him. They began to roll absurdly to and fro on the flagstones, rocking one of the stone tubs with their feet so the tree in it gracefully dropped a leaf. The boy's body arched as he strained to get his knees under Wells and throw him off. He didn't have to; Wells toppled heavily of his own accord. What kind of bodyguard was he?

This all took place rather slowly, giving Angie time to think how stupid, ugly, and yet coordinated it all was. As Wells rolled on top of Jonah and pinned him she had time to see the man's sweaty scalp, the white in his part where the brown had grown out. She saw the back of his hand, a dry old thing crawling with fat veins, as he got a grip on the floor. He had on a wedding ring. His head swung low between his shoulders.

Suddenly Meghan was in the middle of it. “Dammit, Kirby! I told you!” She had him by the hair, wrenching his head up. “I told you! I told you, stay outa my life!” The cords in her neck were standing out like tree roots and it seemed to Angie, who let out a yell, that this was a girl who might not stop before she broke a man's neck. “Christ!” Wells had a hand up, flapping at the girl or protecting his head, and she had bitten the hand. It was then that Cham charged, in her purple robe, driving Meghan off with an elbow, not to spare Wells at all but to slug him with the purse. She hit him in the spare tire toward the back, where the kidneys were. “Cham, for God's sake!” Angie snatched the purse out of her hands. The boy rolled free and Wells let himself down onto the floor with a groan.

Meghan got Jonah by the cast. “Get outa here!” she hissed, dragging him. “Don't go home! He's nuts, he'll go to your house, he'll get Ray up, get outa here!”

“Oh, no he won't.” Wells hung from the bench by one arm. “I quit.” The voice came out of his belly. He brought his watch in front of his face. “I'm nuts? You're a bunch of maniacs. As of now—3:55
AM
—I quit.”

Wells knew the music of Rudy Rudeen. “The man had a voice,” he said. He knew because of course he played the guitar. At least half the men Angie ever ran into played the guitar, Bill Diehl being the exception.

In the eighties Wells had played with two bands nobody ever heard of. The good one, he said with the picky, musician's air familiar to Angie, was modeled on the E Street Band. He considered that he had been pretty good himself, but too old by the time he got good enough. And not in the big leagues, like Rudy. Not with those stubby fingers, she thought. She did not correct him and say, “Actually it was the minor leagues.”

“I'll tell you, it was drugs messed me up for a while there. In the service you could get anything you wanted. But hey, Rudy Rudeen.”

Angie gave a deep sigh, tried to place the accent. “Are you from West Virginia?”

“Close. Ohio. Crost the river from Wheeling.”

“What are you doing out here?”

“Mountains,” he said. “My brother-in-law's out here.” Not “my sister.” It was funny who people had. Cham and Pat, for instance, had each other. This man had his brother-in-law. Angie had Bill and Terri, to bring CDs with them on the night before her surgery and play her “Piece Of My Heart.” Angie had a baby goddaughter, their child. She had Eric, almost a son.

“I've got a son-in-law I feel that way about,” she said, though Eric was not her son-in-law and Wells hadn't said how he felt about his brother-in-law. “Your sister's husband, or your wife's brother?”

“Ex-wife's brother.” He saw her look at his ring. “This keeps the ladies off.”

This could be a joke or one of those unlikely truths. “Anyway, I wasn't going to faint,” Angie said. “I got dizzy. I get that if I stand up too fast.”

“You stay where you are,” Wells said, with some authority.

Angie lay on the couch with her legs bundled in the red robe and the shawl Terri had crocheted for her. She pinched her cold legs, and drank the hot coffee she had made for herself and Wells. While she was pouring it in the half dark of the kitchen, Cham had come in, and stood there without switching on the bank of overhead lights, wringing her hands and talking under her breath. She had her khaki pants on and there were streaks, sweat or tears, in the oil on her face. When she saw Angie she jumped and stopped her mouth with her fist. “Oh, Cham, I'm sorry—” Angie began, but Cham stepped back from her and waved at the coffee maker, saying from behind her fingers, “I, I will do it.”

“No, no, please, you get some sleep,” Angie said. “Believe me I won't, I really won't let anything else happen. I mean it, Cham. I'm sorry.” Cham rubbed at the streaks on her face. At the doorway she threw Angie a squinting look. “OK. So. You. You will watch. OK. OK.”

The candles were burning low on the glass table but the sleeping bags were gone; Angie had banished the girls to Erika's room. “Let them fight it out,” she said to Wells. “Hey, you, go to sleep.” Across the room in the business alcove Jonah was playing a computer game, his face flickering blue.

When he didn't answer, Wells got to his feet. “Did you hear the lady?”

“Yes,
sir
,” Jonah called back. “I'm going to sleep,
sir
.”

After a minute Angie said, “You know, women won't let you go after a kid.”

“Some will,” Wells said.

“I'm sorry Cham got into it. Sorry she hit you. I didn't see that coming. But Cham had children.” Angie had a vision of Cham running into flames, while soldiers went about some awful business. “Cham lost everything.” She tried to think of some reparation that could be made when someone had lost everything. There was nothing. After all the marching and chanting from that war, there was nothing. What must they look like, all of them, to Cham? And she had worried that Cham didn't like her. Didn't like her. “Cham lost everything,” she said again. “But she still takes care of her skin. She oils her face every night when she goes to bed. That's a good sign.”

“Got herself an altar in there, just like back home in Saigon. Incense sticks, oranges, the whole works.”

“Except not Saigon. She's Cambodian. You're telling me you went into her room?”

“I opened a couple doors. Went by the john the first time. This place is a hotel.” Clearly he had figured out it wasn't Angie's place. “Lucky she can't swing, no arm on her. Anyway, the kid went after me, if you noticed. I let him off. I'm not going to beat up on a kid. I'll keep 'em away from her highness, though, I'll do my job. These kids can smell money.”

“I don't think it's money he's after. And you just quit your job.”

“If I had it after tonight. But you'd be surprised. Pappas knows the score. He's onto that little gal. Last time she run off she went clear to Bellingham on the bus. Met this fella there and they went to the doctor, if you know what I mean.”

“Ah,” Angie said.

“I know stuff he don't want to know, her dad. He can forget about watching that one, he's running the company but she's running the show.”

“They grow up,” Angie said sagely.

“Thirteen, fourteen—everything works. All systems go.” He sat forward. “Uh-oh.”

Angie followed his eyes. Erika was on the metal bridge and she was naked. With her arms outstretched and hands flat against the air she was treading slowly backward, holding the frieze of girls who followed her at bay. Meghan came first, soothing her, “Come on now, Rika, come on,” but Erika was climbing onto the metal banister. When she got herself positioned she hooked her ankles and rocked.

Kirby Wells had the shawl whipped from Angie's legs and Jonah was out in the open staring up, knees bent, curved lips caught under his teeth as if he were going to shoot a basket. Ha! Angie thought, kicking to get her legs off the couch. See that? You'll find out! It's way more complicated than you think, with your fists and your kisses.

“You don' know!” Erika croaked. “How do
you
know? We were too going to Alaska! I was going. We were gonna see the Northern Lights!” She righted herself, grasped the rail with both hands. “I wanna, I wanna go!” She teetered on the rail. “We were too going!”

Angie got to the stairs but Wells was already at the top. With a heave, the way lumbermen threw bagged sawdust, he had Erika off the rail. “My dad!” Erika howled. “He's in Alaska! Get off me! And Jonah's! He's there. His real dad!
You
don' know! Tell 'em, Jonah!
Jonah
!”

Tamiko, holding her own cheeks in her hands like a flowerpot, leaned over the rail and raised her melodious voice. “Grandmother! Grandmother! She took pills!”

“What pills?” Wells had Erika wound tight in the shawl. “Spell it!”

“X-A-N-A-X. Two pills! From her mom's room! And—she drank wine, a lot of wine,” Tamiko quavered as an afterthought. “It spilled all over her nightgown.”

“How many pills? Get 'em!” With a knot of tassels, Wells doubled Erika over in the shawl while he stuck what looked like his whole forearm into her mouth. Obediently she retched, groaned, and vomited a stream that dropped in pink flags through the grate. Wells shook off his fingers and plunged them back in. “We got pills in this mess?” he snarled down to Angie. “Don't just stand there. Look.”

“I don't see . . .”

“Get down and look. Two pills? Is that it?” He shook Erika, who flopped against him. “Answer me! That's all?”

“Tha'ss—all.” Erika came to herself enough to hide her face in his jacket.

Tamiko was back with the pill bottle. “Here it is! I know it was two, I swear, I saw.”

“Thanks. You're good, you can apply for my job.” He called down to Angie, “She's all right, better than she looks. Two of those won't slow you down much. It's the wine.” Another girl began to retch. “That's nothing. Copycat. They've all had a few too many, though, the little turkeys. Except this one here, the smart one.” Tamiko stepped back, offended. “Don't worry,” Wells called to Angie, “I did a couple years on the rescue squad.”

Angie held on to the metal. Where was Cham? But Cham was shut away in the room with the altar. Cham had taken her at her word. I won't let anything happen, she had said. She wouldn't let Cham down; she would clean up the mess before Cham got a look at it. Then she thought, Pat's going to try to get the whole story out of me. All of it. Then she thought, if my heart stops now I'll get my chest ripped open by Kirby Wells of the rescue squad.

“Can't tell you what-all I shook outa kids,” Wells said sleepily.

The girls were up. It was too late to go back to bed, it was frank morning and they were taking showers. Three of them were going back and forth along the walkway in a special, created quiet, carrying soft piles of enough towels for twenty bathers, coming down to get lotions out of their bags to offer Erika, who was showering for the second time. Meghan they softly cajoled through a closed door. “OK, here's the thing, you two have to make up. She will if you will.”

A feeling of aloneness came over Angie, like the silence when a vacuum cleaner is turned off. Her legs were cold. The room, too, felt cold, and bare as the hall of a castle. One of the old castles. Not the newer ones, as she had seen for herself in Europe, taking the tour Pat had sent her on before Bill Diehl, but the small ruins, maybe from the Middle Ages—she had not held onto her brochures—that stood
in the middle of nowhere with thick broken walls. The ones where women must have lived, with children if they were lucky, and few arrivals. Each one a kind of kingdom. A kingdom without a king, no matter how they gazed from the roof and waited, most of the time. The men would be out raiding.

Not any more, Pat would say.

Angie leaned back. “Did you ever hear the term ‘pumphead'?” she asked Wells.

“Nope. Something to do with a bong?”

“Ha. It refers to somebody who was on the heart pump.”

He was trying unsuccessfully to stick on the Band-Aid she had brought for his bitten hand. “You,” he said. Glancing into the open neck of her robe he zipped his thumb down his chest.

“Give me that,” Angie said. “Better see somebody for that. She broke the skin.”

“You're a bossy lady.”

“No, I'm not, actually.”

“Lucky she got this one—see? Not my chord hand.”

Funny how chord, the word chord, still went through Angie. She didn't listen to music. Her records slumped on the shelf; she had never even bought a CD. She had turned her back on music, outsmarting the traps laid by the past. Doing this gave her a stubborn satisfaction, a feeling of concealment, as though from a hiding place she could see people from those crowded days of travel and music and sleeping together but they could not see her.

Up and down the rungs went the girls' bare springing feet, their rings on the metal rails making a cross between a rasp and a chime. They took care not to wake Jonah, who sprawled on the couch in the computer alcove, flat morning light on his smooth ribs and tiny nipples and scabs, although they had peered at him long enough to memorize his openmouthed, frowning, half-slain condition and relay it to the two upstairs. They smelled of shampoo; they had pulled their hair back into rubber bands; their eyes shone.