Repo Men (14 page)

I held the Mauser out in front of my body, flicked off the safety, and kicked in the door.

Of my five wives, four of them were talkers. Gold-medal caliber, each and every one, tongues like whips when the mood struck right. The only quiet one among them was my third ex-wife, Melinda, and she stayed silent right up until the end.

Not that it kept any of the marriages from dissolving into crumbs, but I think the verbal sparring matches between myself and my former spouses added a bit of spice to what might otherwise have been boring domestic bliss. I do know that although each marriage ended with a ream of divorce papers delivered to my mailbox, every single one of my relationships began with a protracted conversation:

And now, on the subject of the all-time great talking women in my life, it seems there’s a new one to add to the list:

D
own the barrel of my gun, caught in my sights: She stood in the middle of the suite, feet spread at hip distance, right arm outstretched, left arm supporting an old six-shooter clutched in her hand, the barrel not trembling an inch. A tight bun of shiny blonde hair curled at the back of her head, a single strand dangling down into her eyes, forcing her to blow up a column of air every so often to clear the view. Wrapped in a brown woolen jacket, collar brought up high around her long neck, caressing a strong jawbone. Long, angular face with soft features somewhat familiar, though unplaceable. Blue jeans tight at the hip, flared at the ankle.

“You’re in my hotel,” I said plainly, taking a step into the room.

She cocked the gun, making a big show of it. The hammer clicked back. “Four months,” she said, and though the voice that came out of her mouth was sonorous and smooth, it sounded off. Edgy. “You?”

“Five months,” I said. I’d been here no more than two.

“You’re lying.”

“So are you.”

And still we held our guns aloft, aimed at each another. My arm, unaccustomed to holding anyone at gunpoint in quite some time, began to tire, the triceps trembling a bit; I couldn’t understand how she was able to keep her pistol so rock steady.

The woman inspected me up and down—more than inspected me—devoured me—her gaze sucking in everything, lingering on my crotch, my chest, and suddenly, uncomfortably, I understood what the feminists had been on about all these years.

Eventually, her stare settled on my neck. On the tattoo. Impossible to miss, impossible to misidentify. But whereas most people’s reactions would be shock, fear, anger, she simply said, “I’m guessing that’s pretty old.”

“You’re guessing right.”

“Still active?”

“Not as such, no.”

She nodded. “That’s what I thought.” Again, there was something odd about her voice. Not the tone itself, but the way in which she formed her words. They were crisp, clear—perhaps too much so.

More time passed, and I paced my way about the room, keeping my Mauser aloft, my finger on the trigger. With every second, my arm grew wearier, and I had to bring all of my attention into focus to keep from dropping the pistol to my side. “Look,” I said finally, “this is getting tiring—”

“For you, perhaps. You could always put your gun down.”

“And then?”

“Then I’d probably shoot you,” she said. “But I might not.”

I held the gun higher. “I’m not here to hurt you,” I promised.

“How reassuring.”

Thirteen stories down, a jumble of cars had gathered on the street corner, honking and causing a terrible fuss, the cacophony floating up to the penthouse suite, forming a jangle of music for our little scene. An accident is what it looked like, three-car collision in the middle of the road. Ambulances were just making their way to the intersection.

“You steal a lot of artiforgs?” she asked me, taking her first steps in my direction. They were confident, but oddly stiff.

“I never stole a thing.”

“I read some of that manuscript of yours,” she said, and my Jarvik jumped at the violation. I’d assumed she’d just come in, scribbled that little note for me, and taken off; I had no idea she’d been through my things. “I know what you do. What you did. Make yourself out to be a real martyr.”

“I’m just telling it like it was.”

“There’s no law you’ve gotta write your memoirs before you go,” she told me, and as she walked I thought I heard a familiar knee joint popping and clicking.

“But there are a few about concealed weapons. What say we put these down?”

She pursed those pouty lips and took another look at my Mauser. “You first.”

I nodded. “If you tell me your name.”

“Bonnie,” she said after a time. “I hope that suits you.”

It suited me fine. I put down the gun, told her my name, and we got on with things.

Bonnie’s actually been staying in the Tyler Street hotel for a little less than five weeks, and the penthouse has been only one of her domiciles during that time. Upon first arriving, she found a two-room suite on the ninth floor that hadn’t been affected too badly by the fire, or so she thought until she came back from a trip to the bakery to find that half of her stuff had been buried by a crumbling pile of plaster in the master bedroom. From there she moved into a series of standard rooms on varying floors, none of which afforded her the privacy that she desired; either they were too close to the street below or the insulation had burned away, making them hot during the day, cold at night, and loud all the time.

“But I like it up here,” she told me once we’d dispensed with the weapons and taken a seat across from each other on the penthouse floor. She sat down daintily, with a certain degree of care, as if she were made out of heavy porcelain and didn’t want to chip her edges. “I can make a fair amount of noise without worrying whether street traffic is going to hear me, and as for the other hotel residents…Well, you’re not exactly my worst nightmare on the subject.”

As she spoke, talking mostly about herself while managing to reveal absolutely nothing personal, Bonnie displayed the same warm carelessness in conversation that had drawn me to the other women in my life. Once she got going, she didn’t much care for pauses in speech, didn’t wait to get my response, didn’t ask if she was boring me or losing me or entertaining me. Still, it wasn’t like she was talking just to talk; she was keenly interested in connecting, and though this was probably due to months of enforced isolation, it was flattering nevertheless.

We talked for two hours about the outside world, about the accident-prone intersection below the building, about the dilapidated condition of our current home, about film and music and art and friends—always about others, though, never about ourselves—before I excused myself to find a working restroom. When I returned to the penthouse, Bonnie was gone.

I have a soft spot for women who take off on me. The more they’re gone, the more I long for their return, and the more excited I become at the prospect of seeing them again. My ideal female is a gypsy circus performer with no roots in any town or country who enjoys making herself vanish inside the magician’s velvet box, dabbles in faking her own death, and has been arrested at least three times for identity fraud, yet somehow repeatedly escapes from the maximum-security penitentiaries in which she’s been imprisoned.

I suppose I could take out a personal ad, but my true ideal woman would never show up for the date.

Beth had a habit of disappearing, as well, but back then, whatever dalliances she was off on were just starter recipes for my overactive imagination. Example: If she wrote me a letter telling me she’d gone down to Tijuana for the weekend, I’d instantly imagine her in the local donkey show, pulling ten guys up on stage at a hundred pesos a pop. If she said she’d gone to visit her mom, I suddenly decided that
mom
was a code word for “new boyfriend,” and in my mind she wasn’t shopping and girl-talking for those few days, but was facedown on some stranger’s bed, getting it hard from behind.

I wrote postcard after postcard, simple little letters with a glaring subtext. I wanted more letters from her, more correspondence—anything, so long as it was in her handwriting and had her name scribbled at the bottom. I wanted it to come six, seven times a day. I wanted the military to hire an extra carrier just to be able to handle the volume of letters I would receive from my adoring wife. I wanted to cripple the U.S. postal service with the sheer bulk of twenty-pound paper stock. If she was writing letters all day, I figured, she couldn’t be having sex.

And for every ten letters I wrote, one came back in response. So I’d up it to twenty, and to thirty, but the more often I sent one off, the less often Beth returned the gesture. I would venture to say that during the first six months I was in the desert, I wrote and sent approximately three hundred postcards and letters to my loving wife back home in San Diego.

I received eighteen.

One evening, in a sarcastic fit of rage, jealousy, and a fair amount of whiskey sours, I jotted off what was to be my final postcard sans attorney’s fees. I wrote:

I set myself up, of course. The return letter came back quickly this time:

The divorce papers were stapled to the postcard.

But while tank training continued, I was still laboring under the illusion that my notes home to Beth were doing the job of keeping her in line, and my spirits were high each day of practice. It didn’t take long for Tig and the rest of the brass to figure out that I was crack at driving a tank and lousy at ammunition, so they gave me a permanent driving assignment and sent me out with a rotating series of gunners to see who I’d best be suited to work with.

One day, they put Harold in behind me, and though I was glad to have a mate on board, it was tough going from the start.

“Shove left,” he’d call from the back. “I can’t aim with you going right.”

“Can’t go left,” I’d yell, trying to make myself audible over the noise of the six-ton machinery. We weren’t fitted with talkie helmets yet, and even in the field they proved to be more prone to break than to work, so once inside the tanks, shouting was the best method of getting your point across. “There’s a ditch left.”

“Then rotate,” he’d say. “Rotate!”

And more often than not, I’d rotate in the wrong direction, just to show him who was in command.

Sometimes I wonder if I’d been less of a stubborn bastard, Harold would be alive today. If I’d listened to him and actually worked
with
the guy, the brass might have assigned him to my tank rather than the one that got him dead.

Odds are Harold would have pissed me off enough to drive us all over the edge of the nearest sand dune, anyway.

They sent us back to base camp on weekends, probably because they didn’t want to hear us bitch any more than they had to about sleeping in the control chairs. We’d hook up with our old platoon buddies, take off for twenty-four-hour trips into the Italian countryside, try to get some concept of what the outside world was all about. Of course, we all ended up at the same old places, doing the same old things.

To whatever degree the rest of us were taking to our assignments, Jake Freivald was positively flourishing. He’d gone from a thin, wisecracking NYC wannabe to a staid, filled-out soldier, just as likely to recite basic combat procedure as he would be to tell a dirty joke. Sometimes, he’d do it in the same sentence. The brass had taken notice of his ability and desire and given him extra duty in a recon squad.

“Recon is where it’s at,” he told me one night as we drank cheap red wine. “It’s everything you saw in the movies as a kid, only more.”

“More what?” I asked.

“More everything. More weapons. More tactics. More fun.”

I asked him to give me details, to fill me in on the ins and outs of a job that sounded a hell of a lot more interesting than tank duty, but he was reticent on all matters recon. “Top secret, pal,” he told me, then offered another suck off the wine jug to soothe my spirits.

“Tell ya what,” he said, “if we both get outta here alive, and we’re still talking to each other ten years from now, I’ll tell you anything you want to know about patrols and recon, okay?”

We shook on it.

That was on October 14. Exactly ten years later to the day, I pulled a few strings at the Union to get Jake and myself assigned to run out an entire gastrointestinal system from an ex-football player out in Milwaukee. Workload was heavy that month, and it had been two weeks since we’d seen each other, so we spent the beginning of the job catching up, letting each other in on recent scores and jobs. I was married to Melinda at the time, and Jake liked to get in his jabs about my love life, chastising me for hitching my horse to yet another faltering wagon.

I waited until we’d stabilized the client—six-six, two-eighty, and thank the Lord we brought more than two Tasers with us, because that beast sucked up enough electricity to power the White House Christmas tree—and had already begun the messy extraction process before I let Jake know the importance of this day.

“Been ten years, huh? And you’ve been waiting…” He shook his head, seemingly more amazed that I remembered the date than at the swift passage of time.

“Ten years on the nose,” I said, meanwhile trying my hardest to isolate the football player’s aluminum esophagus catheter; I didn’t want to scuff up the ’forg or bring anything back to the Union that wasn’t their legal property to begin with. “And I’ve been waiting all this time, dreaming up the things you did or didn’t do out in the field. So now you’ve got to tell me—what was recon like?”

Jake put down his scalpel, resting it on the smooth, blank forehead of the prone client. It balanced there like a seesaw, slowly rocking back and forth. “Back then, I thought it was fun. I thought it was dangerous, exciting. Sneaking in and out of locations, isolating targets, identifying enemies. The kind of thing every boy dreams about but never actually gets to do.

“But compared to Union work,” he said flatly, “recon is accountancy.”

So much for illusions. I’ve got a strong history of crumbling expectations, which is why this time around, I’m not counting on anything going down with Bonnie. For one thing, she keeps flaking off on me, and despite my predilection for such things, a woman this chronically invisible can’t be good for any relationship. For another, we’re wholly unsuited to each other. I’ve been wearing the same clothes for the last four weeks; she changes outfits whenever she bathes, which is, naturally, at least ten times as often as I manage to do. She’s got a collection of dresses to match her six different pairs of pantyhose, which she dons at least every other night, despite the fact that, if she’s lucky and does her job right, no one will ever see her. Furthermore, I’m fifteen years her senior, easy, and a man on the run from the Credit Union doesn’t exactly make good husband material. Wendy, my fifth ex, found that out, and quick.