Rag and Bone (12 page)

“I’m no militant,” I said. “I understand discretion, but when I saw you, I was so happy, I didn’t care who was around.”

“You called me Johnny just now,” he said.

“That’s how you introduced yourself when we met,” I said, “but you corrected yourself and said John.”

“I was Johnny when I played ball,” he said. “Back when I was a kid. Now I’m John.”

“You can be Johnny with me sometimes.”

His smile was a complex mixture of happiness and sadness. “What did they call you when you were a kid?”

“Besides
Flaco,
you mean?” I’d been a skinny-bones until I fleshed out in college. “They called me Henry.”

Then he leaned over and whispered into my ear, “I’m going to call you—” and the name he chose revealed it was something he had been thinking about. Then he kissed me and we made out like a pair of horny teenagers.

When I finally came up for breath, I said, “Oh, man. That was intense.”

He released a long, pent-up breath. “You thought I just brought you up here for the view?”

I began to button my shirt. “I’ve never made out in the front seat of a pickup truck. It’s sexy, but kind of cramped.”

“Next time we’ll try the flatbed.” He picked up what was left of his hamburger. He’d sat on it. “I guess I’ll leave this for the coyotes,” he said, tossing it out the window.

I rooted around the floor and found the bag with my food. “Here, mine’s only a little mauled. Eat it.”

“I’m not going to eat your lunch.”

“You’re going back to work,” I said. “I’m going home to take a nap.”

He took the bag. “We’ll share. What’s going on with your niece?”

“My sister’s flying down this afternoon. We’re having a family meeting.” He held out the burger. I took a bite and gave it back. “I know it’s not Vicky’s fault that she irritates me, but honest to God, she’s so passive-aggressive. Instead of saying what’s on her mind, I catch these little looks she gives me. You know how she expresses disapproval of me? By doing my laundry. You should’ve seen her face when she tossed my boxers into the dryer. Like she should be wearing gloves.”

John chuckled.

“What’s funny?”

“The way she pisses you off, she could only be family.” He dipped a mangled french fry into catsup. “You don’t have to like her, Henry. You just have to love her.”

“Where did you read that?” I said. “A greeting card?”

“Chistoso,
” he said. “You’ll do it. You’ll do it for Angel. You already love him, don’t you?”

“It’s funny how much, considering that I hardly know him.”

John smiled and said, “The only time I fell in love at first sight was when I watched them deliver my son.” He crumpled the burger wrapper and tossed it on the floor of the cab, which was already littered with other fast food bags and wrappers. “You want Angel to be like you.”

“He
is
like me,” I said.

“What does his mom want?”

“She says she wants a better life for him.”

John pressed my thigh, a gesture more emphatic than erotic. “When you give him that better life, make sure she’s still a part of it.”

“I’m not going to kidnap him.”

“Being around you, Henry, seeing what you’ve done with your life, he could become ashamed of her. You don’t want to let that happen no matter how screwed up his mom is, because if he’s ashamed of her, some little part of him will be ashamed of himself, too.”

“You know what, John, not everyone needs a family for a sense of identity. Some of us create ourselves.”

He looked at me and said, “You’re all upset now.”

“No, I’m not,” I pouted.

He opened his arms. “Come here,
m’ijo.”

“M’ijo?
I’m six years older than you,” I said as I scooted across the seat.

John dropped me off to an empty house. In blissful quiet, I went into my room and took a nap. When I woke up, I heard Elena’s voice. I roused myself out of bed, put on my bathrobe and emerged. At the doorway of the kitchen, I stopped. Elena and Vicky were sitting at the table drinking coffee, deep in conversation. They were at an angle from which they could not see me. My sister cupped her daughter’s face as she spoke to her in a low voice. Vicky shook her head. Elena dropped her hands and slowly wept. I felt a small presence behind me, turned around, and saw Angelito. I felt momentarily nonplussed at having been caught spying, but then I remembered this kind of lurking seemed to be one of his survival skills.

“Grandma wants us to go home with her,” he said in a low voice. He was carrying Homer, his finger wedged at the page where he had stopped reading.

I stepped away from the door. “When?”

“After we go to the baseball game.” He looked at me.

“No one’s said anything to me about you leaving,” I said, trying to answer truthfully the question in his eyes. “How’s the book?”

“Achilles’s friend, Patro—Patro—”

“Patroclus.”

“Patroclus dressed up like Achilles and Hector killed him. Now Achilles is mad.”

“Patroclus was his best friend,” I said. “Do you want to live with your grandmother?”

He feigned indifference. “Can I take the book?”

“Sure.”

Then he said, “Will you come to see me?”

“You know I will.”

“Henry?” It was Elena. “Is that you?”

I winked at Angelito. “Busted.” I headed back to the kitchen, where I found Vicky stirring a fragrant stew and Elena at the sink washing salad greens. “Hi,” I said, kissing her cheek. “I’m sorry I was asleep when you arrived.”

She dried her hands and hugged me. “You still look tired. How do you feel?”

“Better,” I said. “Hi, Vicky, that smells great.”

“Did we wake you up, Uncle?”

“No,” I said.

“This is the first time we’ve all been together,” Elena observed. “Our first family meal.”

Late that night, after dinner and after Vicky and Angel had gone to bed, Elena and I sat on the deck. I had dug out a dusty bottle of Scotch that had belonged to Josh from beneath the sink and poured her a drink.

“It doesn’t bother you?” she asked, accepting the glass gratefully.

“I hated Scotch,” I said. “Though I suppose if I’d kept drinking, I would’ve ended up guzzling turpentine.”

“Is the sky always red like this?” she asked, looking out over the canyon.

“Usually. It’s a combination of smog and city lights, I think. Angel told me you’re taking them back with you to Oakland.”

“That was always the plan,” she said. She glanced at me. “I would think you’d be relieved. I could cut the tension between you and Vicky with a knife.”

“I know,” I said. “I swear I try, Elena, but we don’t seem to get along. I’ll miss my nephew.”

“You’ll come and see him,” she said. “I’ll persuade Vicky to let him come and visit you.” She took a sip of her drink. “You know I feel about her the same way you feel about him.”

“You’re her mother,” I observed. “I’m her faggot uncle.”

She looked over her glass at me. “She pities you, you know.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Why?”

“You seem like a lonely old man to her.”

“Why doesn’t she feel the same way about you? You’re queer, too.”

“Well, as you said, I’m also her mother. That gives me a primal claim on her. Besides, Vicky doesn’t take my lesbianism very seriously. When I told her I had been a nun, you should have seen the expression on her face. It was as if I suddenly made perfect sense to her.” She sipped the last of the Scotch. “If she sees you as pitiable, she sees me as sexless.”

“How does she explain Joanne?”

She smiled. “Two old crones living together.”

“How can you put up with that condescension?”

“I’d put up with more than that to have my daughter back. Anyway, the more time she spends around us, the more accepting she’ll become.”

“That’s what John said.”

“John? Who’s John?”

“My friend,” I said.

She lifted an eyebrow. “Boyfriend?”

“I’m a little old for a boyfriend, but I suppose you could call him that.”

“No wonder you seem so much better,” she said. “When do I get to meet him?”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “He’s taking Angel and me to a baseball game. It’s strange to be talking to you about my boyfriend. I feel like I’m a tongue-tied twelve-year-old and you’re a worldly seventeen.”

She laughed. “We have a lot of years to make up, Henry, including the awkward ones.” After a moment of comfortable silence, she said, “Vicky told me you looked up her criminal record, by the way, and she told me what was on it.”

“I was only trying to protect you,” I said. “We didn’t know anything about her.”

“Listen, Henry, whatever else you think about her, she’s tried to be a good mother under very difficult circumstances.”

“She created some of those difficulties,” I pointed out.

“You mean the drugs. That was Pete’s doing.”

“How did she end up with such a loser?”

“She met him at a party in San Francisco when she was sixteen. She told me it was love at first sight. He’d just been released from jail so she must have looked pretty good to him, too. They came down here to live with his mother.”

“Sixteen? That’s statutory rape.”

“If anyone had cared,” Elena said. “No one did and she had already been through worse than statutory rape. Marrying Pete gave her the most stable home she’d ever had.”

“From what I know about him, he doesn’t seem prime breadwinner material.”

“Pete didn’t provide the stability, his mother did. Jesusita. Vicky stayed with her even after Pete went back to jail.”

“He’s spent as much of the last ten years in custody as out.”

“Vicky blames his cousin, the same boy who introduced them in San Francisco. Butch, I think she said his name was. According to her, he’s always been the ringleader and Pete just goes along.”

“I can’t believe she’s still making excuses for him.”

“You have to understand, Henry, they were a family, and what that meant to her after growing up in foster homes and orphanages. He gave her the first happiness she ever had in life. The only happiness. You can’t blame her for trying to hold on to it.”

“Why did she come to you rather than go to his mother?”

“I think she’s had enough,” Elena said. “She knows she has to break the cycle and that means separating herself not only from Pete, but Jesusita, too. For better or worse, we’re the alternative.” She put her glass on the railing and said, “I wish we could talk all night, but I really have to get some sleep. You really don’t mind me taking your bed?”

“The couch in my office will be fine for me,” I said.

She kissed my cheek. “Good night, Henry. Thank you for taking care of Vicky and Angel.”

The next time I saw my sister, she was shaking me awake, a frantic look on her face.

“Elena? What’s wrong?”

“They’re gone,” she said.

A
SUDDEN TWISTING PAIN
in my chest as if I’d strained a muscle, made me wince as I got up from the couch and threw on my bathrobe. I limped across the house to the guest room. The bed was neatly made up, the room was empty. I looked beneath the bed where I had seen Vicky stow their suitcase. It was gone. When I looked up, Elena was sitting on the edge of the bed.

“I don’t understand it,” I said. “If she was going to leave, why didn’t she just leave? Why pretend with us? It’s not as if we could have forced her to do anything she didn’t want to do.”

“The only way she could leave was without telling me because she knew if we had talked it out, she would have changed her mind.”

“That doesn’t make sense. You offered her hope of a new life.”

She smiled wearily. “At the price of her old life.”

“You mean she prefers the devil she knows.”

“Pete may hit her, but she doesn’t feel inferior to him. Not the way she does to us. She’d always feel like she was the poor relation.”

“Are you defending her decision to go back to him?”

“No, I’m only trying to understand how she feels,” she said. “So that next time I’ll know what to say to her.” She stood up. “God, I need a cup of coffee.”

“I want to call Edith Rosen,” I said. “She talked to Vicky yesterday. Maybe she said something to her. Come into my office. I’ll put her on the speaker phone.”

When I told Edith that Vicky and Angel had left, she said, “I thought there was a good chance this would happen.”

“Elena thinks it was because we overwhelmed her. Do you?”

“Possibly,” she replied. “On the other hand, it could have nothing to do with you. The literature on battered women’s syndrome talks about three stages of abuse. Tension-building, acute explosion and loving contrition. If that’s Pete and Vicky’s pattern, they might be in that third stage where’s he’s promised to change and she’s talked herself into believing him. Of course now that she’s gone back to him, the tensions will start again, like clouds gathering before a storm.”

“Then another explosion,” Elena said.

“Another blowup may be what it takes to break the cycle, if that’s what’s going on,” Edith said.

“You keep saying ‘if,’” I said.

“I wouldn’t swear that Vicky’s a battered woman.”

“She still had the bruises from the last beating he gave her,” Elena said.

“I know, I saw them, but when I actually pressed her for details of the abuse, she was vague.”

“Can you blame her?” Elena asked. “She was ashamed.”

“I’ve been a forensic psychologist for a long time,” Edith said. “I know the difference between someone who’s evading a painful subject and someone who’s making things up.”

“You think she fabricated the abuse?” I asked.

“I don’t know that,” she said, a bit defensively. “But something felt a little hinky.”

Usually I deferred to Edith’s intuitions, but this one seemed off base. “Then she’s either a pathological liar or she was playing on our sympathy,” I said. “Vicky doesn’t fit the profile of a pathological liar and if she wanted us to feel sorry for her, she didn’t stick around for the payoff.”

After a moment, Edith said grudgingly, “You’re probably right. I didn’t have much time with her and she wasn’t particularly forthcoming.”

“You have any idea where she might have gone?”

“There was one thing. She asked me to drive her to a church somewhere on Beverly. A storefront church. Pentecostal. It had a Spanish name. Iglesia de Cristo something. She went in while Angel and I waited for her. She was there for a good thirty minutes. Does that mean anything to you?”