Lamb (2 page)

Lamb rubbed his temple and thought he might sit down right there in the parking lot, wait to see who’d come for him or who would ask him to move, but when he turned away from the wake of traffic to light the cigarette, he saw the girl.

She was coming toward him in a lopsided purple tube top and baggy shorts and brass-colored sandals studded with rhinestones. She carried a huge pink patent-leather purse and was possibly the worst thing he’d seen all day. Scrawny white arms and legs stuck out of her clothes. The shorts hung around her pelvic bones and her stomach stuck out like a dirty spotted white sheet. It was grotesque. It was lovely. Freckles concentrated in bars across her cheekbones and down the tiny ridge of her nose and the slightest protruding curve of her forehead just above her eyebrows. There were huge freckles, pea
sized, and smaller ones. Some faint, others dark, overlapping like burnt confetti on her bare shoulders and nose and cheeks. He stared at her. He had never seen anything like it.

“Hi.” She had a little gap between her front teeth, and her eyes were wide set, and she had one of those noses with perfectly round nostrils. She was a pale little freckled pig with eyelashes. “I’m supposed to ask you for a cigarette.”

Behind her, huddled near the trash can up against the brick wall of the CVS, two girls were watching in a bright little knot of bangles and short shorts and ponytails. He looked at the girl. Her chewed and ratty fingernails. Her small feet in shoes two or three sizes too big for her. Her mother’s shoes, he supposed. He felt a little sick.

“What is this?” he said. “Some kind of dare?”

The girl tipped her head, put her hand up to her eyes to shield the sun.

“What grade are you in?”

“Seventh.”

“Don’t they teach you anything?”

She shrugged. Behind her the girls were laughing.

“Was this your idea?”

Shrug.

“Whose was it?”

“Sid’s.”

“Which one is she?”

The girl turned around and her friends became suddenly still. “The one on the right,” she said.

“The blonde.”

“Yeah.”

“Sid like Sidney.”

“Yeah.”

Sid knew she was being studied. She pushed back her hair and stuck out her hip.

“She in seventh grade too?”

“We all are.”

“She looks older.”

“I know.”

David Lamb reached into his pocket for the cigarettes. He looked up at the cameras above the CVS, cameras that were pointed at the doors and at the parking lot. He shook one out and gave it to her. She turned back toward her friends with the cigarette in her hand and giggled.

“Well, go on,” he said. “Put it in your mouth and I’ll light it. A lady doesn’t light her own cigarette.” She put it between her lips and raised her eyebrows. “That’s it. Now steady. Don’t look at the cigarette, look at me,” he said, touching the lit end of his own cigarette to hers. “Inhale. Go on. Draw it in.” He straightened and she puffed.

“Now,” he said, “what do I get in exchange?”

She held the half-lit cigarette between two fingers and wrinkled her forehead. “I don’t have anything.”
The girl looked uneasy. She lifted her hand, as if to offer back the cigarette.

“No money?”

She shook her head. “What’s in that purse?”

She lifted it a little, remembering it. “Makeup,” she said. “Nothing.” Her eyes darted sideways, as if she knew she was in a place she shouldn’t be. Behind her the blond girl said something to the other, and they laughed. This ugly kid before Lamb obviously the brunt of their joke. Stupid. And reckless. Had they any idea who he was? Why he was standing there alone in a black suit? What kind of heart, if any, hung inside him? And how was this not a joke on him? He took a long pull on his own cigarette and put it out on the bottom of his beautiful polished shoe. The girl watched him flick out the last shreds of tobacco and put the soiled filter in his pants pocket. There was no wind, no birds, no one calling. The sky hung low and white and warm like the ghost of something.

“Don’t you wish you’d been born sooner?” he said, looking over her head at the grease-stained asphalt. The freckled girl watched him take the cigarette from her hand, ash it, and return it to her fingers. She meant to go back now—but she leaned back a little on her heels, staring up at him.

“Tell me something. Do your friends frequently put you up to things like this?”

“I guess.”

He nodded down at his suit. “I just buried my father.”

“Oh.”

“Ever been to a wake?”

She scrunched up her nose at him.

“It’s like a funeral.”

She shook her head. He studied the part in her hair. Pink stripe of skin through hair so pale it was almost white. “Listen,” he told the girl, “your friends are laughing at you. You know that, don’t you?”

She pulled up the sides of her purple top, one side at a time. It slipped down.

“I’m going to give you a tip, okay? A favor.”

She shrugged and lifted her fingers as if to say: but you already gave me the cigarette.

“No,” he said, “this is something you’re not going to forget. I’ll give you this whole pack of cigarettes, okay?” He took them out of his pocket and made a big show of dropping them into her purse. Her friends were watching now. He had their attention. “In exchange, you let me play a trick on your friends. On Sid. Teach her a lesson.”

“I don’t know.” She squinted her eyes. “What kind of trick?”

“Let’s scare them.”

“How?”

He took the girl’s bare arm just above the elbow and she jerked back, as if suddenly awake. Everything quickened. The sky seemed brighter, traffic faster. “Let’s pretend,” he said low, talking fast, already pulling her toward his Ford, “that I’m kidnapping you. I’m going to pull you, just like this—” She dropped the cigarette and tripped over the long ends of the sandals. “And I’m going to walk you to my car,” he said, pulling her along. “You’re not going to scream, but you’re going to look back at them. Okay? So they know you’re afraid.” Inadvertently the girl did exactly as he said. “Now don’t freak out,” he said. “We’re just scaring your friends. They deserve it, right? I’m not going to hurt you.”

“No,” she started. “Wait.” He opened the driver’s side of the navy blue Explorer and lifted and sort of pushed her over into the passenger seat. It was all done in less than ten seconds. She smacked her head against the window and cried out.

“I’m teaching you a lesson, right?”

She put her hands against the inside of the window and looked at her friends, who stood frozen, the ends of their ponytails hung limp in the thin air.

Lamb pulled the door shut and locked it and started the engine. “You’re not hurt, are you?” She
shrank against the door, holding her head. “I’m taking you home,” he said. “I’m just taking you home. What’s your address?” She faced the window and pulled on the door handle again and again and again, knocked and knocked, and she looked back at him over her shoulders. Her eyes were huge. Then they were free and clear, out of the parking lot and onto the four-lane.

“Where do you live?” he raised his voice, gained speed. “Tell me which way.” They passed a KFC, a BP. She told him in a trembling voice and he repeated it, pointing over the tops of the stores to three apartment buildings. The girl nodded. He scolded her the whole way, playing it angry. His hands were shaking on the wheel. The backs of his thighs wet. He yelled at her like he thought a father would have done.

“I could be taking you somewhere to kill you. You know that?”

She clung to the door on her side.

“It was a dumb thing to do, coming up to me like that. Wasn’t it?”

She pulled at the handle again and again.

“Say something.”

“I’m sorry,” the girl whispered. “Please.” She was terrified. Well, good. It was true, what he’d said. He could be taking her off to kill her. He could do anything he wanted. Her lips drew in
toward her gapped teeth. “Now just stop it,” he said. “Just stop it.” And when he saw where she lived, near the freeway behind a gas station off six lanes of traffic—and for the second time in the minutes since she’d first approached him—a feeling of pity for her was eclipsed by the shock of knowing he, too, was on the losing end of all this. After all, here he was. It was a moment they were trapped in together.

“Don’t let your friends push you around like that,” he said. She stared at him and tugged on the door handle. “And put some clothes on.” He looked her up and down. “I mean, what are you supposed to be? Who decided you were going to be this way—all stupid and … dressed like that?”

“Please,” she whispered. She was white.

“Now wait,” he said and pulled into the square lot before the entrance of her building. He unlocked the doors and she fell out. “Wait a minute,” he said. He had her purse and waved it. “Keys?”

She crawled up onto her feet and stepped away from the car, a body’s length away, and looked at the purse.

“Give it to me!”

“Now wait a minute.”

“Calling the police!” Her voice was shrill. Lamb glanced around. It was an accusation. A warning. But only because she was humilated. Lamb saw her
taking it all in: his expensive suit, the Ford Explorer, the leather seats, his clean haircut, his smooth face, everything clean, everything expensive, everything easy. He handed her the purse and she took out the cigarettes and threw them at him.

“I’m not a bad guy,” he said. “But I could have been.”

Her eyes were lit up with hate.

“Good,” Lamb said. “That’s good.” There was some little filament of heat in this girl that he had not expected, and he was relieved to see it, relieved to be surprised by something. By anything. Across from the apartment building a traffic light turned green and a car honked and the traffic moved again. A middle-aged man with a huge gut and a brown mustache stood at the glass doors watching them.

“Maybe I should come in and tell your folks what happened,” he said.

“Nobody’s home.” Of course they weren’t.

“You have sisters? Brothers?”

“I have friends.” She flung her words like stones.

“That’s right,” Lamb said, nodding. “You think they went in that drugstore to tell someone what happened?”

She looked at him, her eyes reducing back to their stupid blue. “No.”

“Me either.”

He watched her face fall. He knew what that was. He knew about the room she was shrinking into. “I could make up any old story to tell them,” she said.

He thought about it. Imagined what the stories could be. He looked at her bare arms and legs, her stapled, makeshift tube top slipping down her narrow chest. “Tell them I took you shopping.”

“Oh, that’s good.”

“Okay, then.”

“Okay. Bye.”

They looked at each other a second, two, and she stepped away, slammed the door shut. She turned and walked up to the building. A latchkey kid. The sort who got C’s in school. Not a pretty kid, not an athletic kid, not a smart kid. Just a skinny, slow-blooming kid desperate to keep up with her friends. Quick to make new ones. Stupid. Maybe she’d learned something today. Maybe he’d done her a favor. What’d it matter? Girl like her.

That wasn’t kidnapping. It had been a favor, right? A lesson. He hadn’t kidnapped anyone. She was back in her apartment, having dinner with her parents, her girlfriends perhaps chastened of whoring each other
out for laughs in parking lots. It wasn’t kidnapping when the kid ended up safely delivered home in better shape than she left in the morning. It was like he found a loose bolt out there in the world and had carefully turned it back into place. It was fine.

It was six. He was back in the Residence Inn. Across the hall was another man, just like him. Both their beautiful houses for sale. Both their aging wives back on the market. He and this other guy—they even had the same haircut, the same belly just beginning to roll over the same beautiful leather belt. Why was it everywhere he looked he saw an incomplete version of himself? What was he supposed to do? Complete this stranger across the hall? Why was everything such a riddle?

He was supposed to call Linnie, drive her north along the lake. Spaghetti. Ribs. And walk until they felt the bite of October coming over the water, her eyes an unreal green in the dark. An expensive and well-educated system of reactions and responses, and he knew them all. Had known them, frankly, since years before she was born.

Damp from the shower, he sat on the edge of the hotel bed in his towel, traffic shushing and the light failing. There was room service: the Caesar, the salmon, the spinach omelet; the steakhouse
nearby that would deliver; the sort of French café down the street that’d be empty—he could have a table alone and not be bothered. Or he could find someone to bother him. He took shallow breaths, his thoughts quick images of prepared food, of his father’s translucent hand, himself as he’d looked at nineteen, all his hair dark, Linnie’s young naked body from the front, the back, another plate of food with french fries on it, one image superimposed upon another until suddenly he felt the phone in his hand.

He called Cathy. He didn’t expect an answer, but he’d hear at least her recorded voice. He wanted to hear that. But on the telephone was no recorded voice, no cheerful greeting—only the broken succession of minor notes signaling that he’d dialed the wrong number, that the number had been disconnected or changed. He paused, closed the phone, and lay back, setting it on his bare chest. His face heated and reddened and he lay still, absorbing the shock of it. This was September. This was going to be their second courting period. He was going to win her back. Linnie would be off with some other slick young guy. Everything would be all knit up by Thanksgiving. The house would fail to sell, and everything back the way it was before. She would forgive him. She
always did. They’d build a fire and wear long pajamas and drink tea and she would touch the sides of his face and he would be sorry. And she would forgive him.

He sat up, opened the phone, and dialed the girl.

“Linnie. It’s me. Yeah yeah, I know. I know.” He was whispering. “I’m sorry, baby. What? Listen. I can’t talk long. Cathy’s downstairs.” His eyes watered and the darkening hotel room smeared. “Oh, stop it. That’s not true. Linnie. I swear, okay? God’s honest truth.” He spoke very quietly. A man and woman passed outside his hotel room door. “Listen,” he said, “I’m lying here naked on the bed.” He gathered himself in his hand and asked her if she’d talk to him. Five or six minutes. And he promised her they’d have another weekend soon. Yes, Cathy would be going out of town, he’d get them a room somewhere, and he turned his head sideways to rest the phone against his shoulder and he took himself in both hands.