Lydia (15 page)

“I’ll need time to work on my truck.”

“We leave the Friday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend. That’s my window—three days without a command performance for the Nazi parole officer.”

“She won’t make it to California without new brakes, and I can’t put them in that soon. Sam won’t let me off to work on my truck.”

“Sam will let you off when I tell him to let you off.” Lydia dropped her brush into her purse and clicked
the latch. “Besides, we are taking my BMW, so it is no concern whether your truck has brakes or not.”

“Your car needs a brake job too.”

“Not if one downshifts properly.” Lydia paused for dramatic effect. “Roger.” She went for eye contact. She often went for eye contact when it was least expected. “Don’t go wimbly on me. It’s eleven hundred miles to Santa Barbara, which we can drive in eighteen hours, easily. Add another four hours for side trips and round it off to one full day there and one full day back. That leaves twenty-four hours to complete our business in time for me to report to the bureaucratic bitch Tuesday morning.”

Roger met her gaze head on. “What side trips?”

“Something always comes up.” Lydia broke the eye contact, somewhat unnerved that Roger had matched her, intensity for intensity. “We must plan for every mishap.”

Roger crossed his arms and stared at Lydia. He was old enough to know when someone was working an angle on him. He just couldn’t see it. He knew she would be in serious trouble if they were caught out of state, and she wasn’t the type to do good deeds without a return. “I’d still rather take my own truck. I don’t like driving other people’s cars. Not that far, straight through. Your plan doesn’t allow for me sleeping, coming or going.”

“I shall drive while you take naps.”

“You don’t have a license.”

Oly’s throat rattled and he spoke, sounding like an Old Testament God with a head cold. “I can drive an automobile.”

Lydia’s heart gave a little jump. “I always forget he’s not dead.”

Oly swiveled his tortoise head in Lydia’s direction. “I will take my fair turn behind the wheel.”

***

Lydia continued speaking to Roger, as if they were alone in a room full of plastic plants and sunlight. “Ignore that sound.”

“Why should I do that?” Roger asked.

“If you listen to senior citizens, it only encourages them.”

Oly burst into song. He sang, “
I will be by your side,
” to the tune of the last phrase of “Sidewalks of New York.” This, he repeated several times.

Lydia suddenly flung her attention toward Oly. She called, as if calling to someone in a high wind. “The tape machine is put away, Oly. You don’t have to be awake.”

Oly chewed his lower lip, which can be done if you’ve stretched it daily for nearly a century. His head bobbed a bit, then he came out with, “I am stapled to your backside, so far as California is concerned.”

Lydia turned back to Roger. “What is the coot talking about? I can’t make out a word he says.”

“He says he’s going to Santa Barbara with us,” Roger said.

Lydia dropped into denial. “Do you know what
No way, Jose
means, old man? Is that a term bandied about by you doughboys back in the Great War?”

Oly sat up, almost straight in his chair. His body had the posture of a whitebark pine, way off alone on a ridgeline. “You are unable to travel without Oly Pedersen.”

Lydia said, “Watch me.”

Oly’s goiter bobbed in counterpoint to his Adam’s apple. It made for a disquieting effect. He said, “If you leave Oly behind he shall tell the woman who comes to visit wearing green trousers. Has a mustache here.” He gestured where Brandy Epstein’s mustache was. “Walks like she has a dowel rod up her patootie.”

Roger said, “What’s a patootie?”

“My parole officer’s a-hole,” Lydia said. “What’s a dowel rod?”

“A stick.”

Oly plowed on. “The woman told me. She said if you do anything I don’t want or don’t do anything I do want, I should telephone her right away and she would clap you back in the hoosegow.”

Lydia sat down hard. “I cannot believe I’m in the presence of a being who just said
hoosegow
.”
She shouted directly at Oly, “Hopalong Cassidy is dead, Gabby! It’s your turn now!”

Oly stuck the hearing aid back in. “No need to raise your voice. I can hear fine. You’re the one misses half of what any given person says.”

Roger said, “He’s got a point.”

“I don’t care what he’s got. We can’t take a hundred-year-old satchel of bones and blood on a road trip.”

“Why not?” Roger said.

“What he said,” Oly said.

Lydia couldn’t understand why Roger was taking Oly’s side. Why would any man take the side of another man against her? That atrocity had never happened before prison. Three years of being out of circulation seemed to have changed the rules—tipped the balance in a way she didn’t care for.

“For one thing,” she said, “we only have three days to reach the coast, discover your roots, and return home. He’ll be forcing potty stops every ten miles.”

“I can hold my water as long as you can, little lady.”

“I’ll drive myself alone,” Roger said. “Sam will loan me the van.”

“You’ll do no such thing.” Lydia sat with her purse on her lap, strumming the fingers of both hands across the clasp. To the casual eye, she looked uncertain—the classic female stuck between two distasteful choices, refusing both. Her gaze wandered from the floor to the mountains to Oly. In reality, she had already accepted the hard facts and was now quickly working out a new implementation.

She said, “Do you have any concept of how long that frowzy bureaucrat will put me back inside if you were to die on this trip?”

Oly snorted, bull-like. “I shall outlive you, missy.”

First
little lady
and now
missy
.
Even Roger knew Oly was flirting with violence. At the rate he was offending Lydia, there was a decent chance he wouldn’t survive till lunch.

“How am I supposed to spirit you out of Heaven House?” Lydia asked.

“Haven House,” Roger said.

“I was making an ironic point.”

Roger shrugged. He didn’t see the point of mispronouncing words on purpose, ironically or any other way.

“Someone will object,” Lydia said. “That bodyguard girlfriend of yours will dial 911.”

Oly clenched both handrails of his chair with whatever grip he had left. “I am with you till we complete the mission.”

“It can’t be done.”

If Oly had had a chin, he would have stuck it out. As it was, he stuck out his turkey neck. “You are a sharp cookie. Make a scheme.”

***

Roger found me in the former tack room turned office, fighting with my first computer, a brand-new Macintosh Centris. What I couldn’t figure out was why when I hit Return at the end of a line, it returned twice. And why I couldn’t make the tab come out right or start a new page at the end of the one I was typing. Whatever is simple on a typewriter is complicated on a computer. And vice versa.

Roger stood at my shoulder, watching. “What are you doing, Sam?”

“I make the arrow go side to side with this mouse goober, but when I reach the edge of the pad, the arrow stops. I can’t make it go on farther.”

“Pick the mouse up.”

“What?”

“Lift the mouse off the pad.”

“Won’t that make the arrow disappear?”

“No, it won’t. Lift the mouse.”

I lifted the mouse. The arrow didn’t disappear.

“Put it down in the center of the pad.”

I did.

“Now move the mouse.”

Problem solved.

***

Roger gave me the lowdown on the
Disappearance
book and Lydia’s theory—Santa Barbara, Freedom, Fred, Oly’s part in the scenario.

“Loren Paul had great potential as a novelist. He could have been a literary lion,” I said. “The last I heard he was writing a daytime television serial mostly set in the powder room at Caesar’s Palace, the one in Vegas. Some sort of trash about bonus baby women and their personal assistants, locked in for a month.”

“I haven’t seen TV in a while,” Roger said.

“He’s making a billion dollars on it,” I said. “Too bad. He once published a novel called
Yeast Infection
that was revolutionary.”

“You think Loren could be my stepfather?”

I hit the Save key—I knew that much—and moved to my coffee-making station. “I went looking for my dad once,” I said. “It turned out badly. I wreaked havoc on a bunch of innocent folks. You want a cup?”

Roger nodded. The one trait I’d passed on to him was the coffee habit. “You think me showing up might hurt this guy and his wife?”

“Anytime you change the past, there are consequences.”

Roger trailed across the tack room after me. “The past is done with. The facts can’t be changed.”

“How people see the past is what matters. Facts themselves are irrelevant. This trip may or may not screw up Loren and his wife in Santa Barbara, but it’s almost bound to change you.” I poured water from my liter bottle into the Hot Shot. “You sure you want to change?”

Roger opened my dorm-sized refrigerator and pulled out a can of milk. “I’d like to know what happened before I came to Wyoming.” He opened the can with what in my youth was called a church key. I don’t know what the thing is called now.

“I’m happy enough.” His mouth pursed, like he was tasting the statement for accuracy. “I’m okay, anyway, except for the suicide beyond my control thing.”

“There is that.”

“It feels like I’m a kid, content to play in the sandbox, only a Dempsey Dumpster is hanging over my head. It’s hard to get on with life, knowing it might fall on me at any moment. I can’t relax.”

“So it’s better to make the Dumpster fall on your head than to wait for it to crash of its own accord. Symbolically speaking.”

“Lydia says it’s not healthy for me to hang around you and a bunch of miserable pregnant teenagers. She told me this story about Jim Bridger and the arrowhead.”

Actually, I told the story to Lydia first, but she’s long since forgotten her source. This is it: An Indian zings
an arrow into Jim Bridger’s back, but it doesn’t kill him. Jim goes about his mountain man business for twenty years with an arrowhead embedded just below the shoulder blade. It bothers him quite a bit, but he can live with the discomfort. Then, a preacher comes along who claims he can Bowie knife the arrowhead out of Jim. The operation hurts like holy hell, but afterward Bridger is out of pain for the first time since the Indian nailed him.

“It’s Lydia’s seminal story,” I said.

“Seminal?”

“She defines herself by it. She used to tell it to Shannon in the crib.”

“Maybe that’s why Shannon grew up so peculiar.”

“My daughter is not peculiar. She’s the picture of mental health, in her own way. Have you considered why Lydia wants the two of you to go off on this adventure?”

“Three, now Oly’s coming with us.”

I poured boiling water over the grounds. “What’s in it for Lydia?”

Roger gave the question some thought while I pushed the screen through the liquid and onto the soggy grounds—cowboy coffee you don’t chew. Neither one of us believed my mother was capable of committing an act of goodness, for the sake of itself. Roger was young and I’m idealistic, but he wasn’t that young and I’m not that idealistic.

“Perverse curiosity,” Roger said. “She read the book in prison when she had time on her hands, and she thinks she’s figured out the unsolved mystery. She wants to see if she’s right.”

I poured the coffee into two mugs I got free for contributing to public radio. “That’s possible, but Lydia is not a basket you want to put all your eggs in.”

Roger dribbled milk into both mugs. “I don’t think of Lydia as an egg basket.”

“She’s as likely to ditch you at a rest stop as not. She did it to me once when I was little. She claimed she thought I was asleep in the backseat.”

Roger lifted his cup and sipped. “You don’t trust your mother.”

“Not for a second.”

Dawn found Leroy folded inside a cardboard KitchenAid refrigerator box under a boulevard overpass on the south fringe of Trinidad, Colorado. He slid from the box and walked barefoot across gravel and glass to a Speed Limit 35 sign, where he unzipped and peed, leaning his forehead against the post, scratching a Z-shaped scar over his liver. A vehicle bigger than a station wagon but smaller than a bread truck rolled down the four-lane street. Some newfangled rig that had come out while he was in Bogotá. The car—or whatever it was—lights swept across Leroy as it pulled into a Zippy Mart parking lot. A man in a hard hat and a down vest got out and went inside.

Leroy stepped out of the shorts. Naked, he sniffed the crotch, then turned them inside out and put them back on with the pockets flapping on his thighs like wing pouches. He spit a substance solid enough to bounce. He stuck a finger back where his upper molars used to be, and dug a food morsel from between his gums and cheek. The hard hat came from the Zippy Mart, slapping a pack of Tareytons against his forearm, got back into his boxy vehicle, and drove away. It was bright enough now the man didn’t turn his headlights back on.

Leroy needed coffee. He’d learned to live without what most others considered necessities if he had to, but he’d never come to terms with a morning without coffee.

***

An electronic beeper buzzed when Leroy entered the Zippy Mart. It was empty except for an underweight girl with cropped neon hair and a roofing nail in her cheek, sitting behind the counter, reading a
Silver Surfer
comic. Leroy had seen the weird hair and body spikes in Venice Beach, but he hadn’t realized the style had reached Colorado.

She glanced up at him and snapped her bubble gum. “No shirt, no shoes, no service.”

“What’s that mean?” Leroy crossed to a coffee urn and poured coffee into a huge cup. Must have held a quart.

The girl bobbed her nail at a sign next to the smokeless-tobacco display cutout of a cowboy. No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service. Another sign read: We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Premenstrual Women.

“Normally, I wouldn’t go anal on you, but my boss will be along soon, to get the night deposit, and he’ll fire my butt if you’re hanging out in here like that.”

Leroy chugged a fair portion of coffee, then he refilled his cup.

The girl said, “I like your tattoo.”

Leroy picked up a packet of buffalo jerky, aerosol deodorant, and a box of Red Hots and walked to the cash register.

The girl seemed mesmerized by his flaming-babies tattoo. She said, “Why are your shorts on inside out?”

“Other side is dirty.”

She nodded and said, “Oh.” She was wearing acid-washed Levi’s with silver pocket studs and a Zippy Mart uniform shirt that was pale pink with thin red stripes. A card pinned to her breast read
Z
.

“What’s
Z
?” Leroy asked.

“Zelda. They screwed up my name tag, and now I’m Z. Listen, Mister, you can keep the coffee ’cause you already drank it, but I can’t sell you the other stuff.”

Leroy looked from the jerky to Zelda’s eyes, swollen that pink puffiness you see on people who work night shifts. She had an acne rash around the spike and what might have been a hickey on her neck, over the tonsils. She looked like a dropout.

“Give me your shirt,” Leroy said.

“Are you squirrelly?”

He enunciated each word, leaning into her face. “Take your shirt off and give it to me.”

Zelda blinked. Twice. “What about the shoe rule?”

“I’ll take them too.”

Zelda popped her gum thoughtfully, while Leroy waited. He had become an accomplished waiter, the last few years. Before Bogotá, he would have taken what he wanted, walked out, and risked her calling the cops.

Zelda fingered her top button. “I don’t know what my boss will say. He’s Church of Christ.”

“He will thank you for following the law.” Leroy leaned farther over the counter to check her shoes—low-rider tennies without laces. No doubt too small. When he looked back up, Zelda stood there with her shirt wadded in her hand. She wore a red lacy bra that covered her nipples and the undermoon of her breasts.

“Do you live in Las Animas County?” she asked.

The shirt stretched across Leroy’s back, but so long as he didn’t bother with buttons, it was functional.

When he didn’t answer, Zelda went on, “I just wondered if you’re from here. I get off soon. We could go to my place and smoke weed. My mom and dad will have gone to work by the time I come home.”

Leroy tipped his Styrofoam cup and drank till black liquid dribbled off his chin. “Not me.” He set the jerky, deodorant, coffee, and Red Hots on the counter, then he pulled a bag of Planters nuts from a wire rack next to a magnet display with sayings like Born to Fish and Honk If You’re Horny. “Get me a pack of Lucky Strikes.”

When Zelda turned to find the cigarettes, Leroy swiped a lighter. “That’ll be eight fifty-three,” she said.

He dug into the pocket, which was awkward, it being on the outside his shorts, and drew out the filthy fiver he’d been holding on to since California. “This is close as I can come.”

She looked him in the eye and gave a twitch of a wink. “Maybe we could trade up for the rest.”

“Maybe you could bag my stuff and call it even.” He stuck the five in his outside back pocket, behind the lighter. “What was that you said about a night deposit?”