Ride Around Shining (24 page)

“You make great amends,” I said.

At the first whiff of moral judgment he lapsed again into self-pity. “Oh God, I'm not like this. You know I'd never touch her. You know me. I'm a feminist.”

With this appeal he rose off his seat a little and stretched his arms out, compelling my belief. When he settled again, something in his pants clinked.

“That's just my keys,” he said quickly.

I tapped the curtain rod against my knee, and with a sigh he let a pair of handcuffs leak out onto the floor.

“He gave them to me,” he mumbled.

“Good,” I said. “Hook yourself to that sink and then you can clean yourself up.”

“Here? I got to get to the hospital. You think I want to wear a face mask all season?”

I lifted the camera. “Link up and you get this back. We'll call you an ambulance.”

He frowned and bunched the cuffs in his fist like he was thinking of bucking me. I couldn't tell if he knew about my arm, but even if I was healthy, he was still an athlete facing a man with a curtain rod. My only real instrument of control was his shame, his ever-fleeting shame. Any moment he could forgive himself and forget his humiliation, and after that I knew my chances weren't good.

I tugged the hood forward as far as it would go and laid the rod against the sink. “Come on,” I said, in my best hard voice. “She needs a hospital.”

Reluctantly he linked one cuff to himself, but I didn't hear a click. Then without warning he stood up slowly, tossing off the mat and hitching his pants as the cuffs fell to the floor.

“Say, why didn't you stop your car up there?” he said, his voice suddenly dangerous with the delusion of reason. “You're some driver. We could've all been killed!”

“Why didn't
I
?”

“I left you plenty of room to stop,” he assured me, and then he reached out and gave me a hard, brotherly clap on the arm and I heard myself cry out in pain.

“Whoa there, son,” he said. “You hurt, too?”

“Hey,” I heard a voice whisper behind me. “Hey, guys.”

She was standing in the hall at the edge of the light, her face partly in shadow, so you could only see her mouth and the hollow of her throat, and then her crumpled dress, in place now, and beneath her puffy, discolored knees.

“Hey, girl,” Goat said. “You feeling better?”

Something in the set of her mouth made me stand aside.

“What happened to your face?” she asked him.

“I got into a car accident,” he said. “Now we're all going to the hospital.”

I was between them and trying to look at both of them and then I felt her hand on mine, and a tug at the rod.

“Hey,” she said to Goat. “Say that again. Say ‘Hey, girl.'”

“What?” He smiled like she was making a joke he didn't understand.

Again there was a tug at the rod, and I loosed my grip.

“Say ‘Hey,'” she said.

Her face came into the light, the rod upraised in her hand. He put his hands up, ready to stop the blow, but she held the rod too high, and the tip glanced against the door frame and rebounded back. She felt it and crouched as she rushed at him, and hit him low with the knob held in her fist. His face popped with agony and surprise, but she'd gone to her knees, and he reached down and his hand came up full of her hair. I watched the look come across his broken face, with its small mustache stained with clotted blood, the wild look of a man gone beyond his knowledge of himself into some new, instinctual place, and as he pulled her head back so her face was upraised he brought his other hand up fisted and backhanded, and I was moving. As I reached out to block the stroke, I knew myself again as I always had, a clumsy man of inaction, but I knew, too, that I was the one making the amends, while he was just cornered with the knowledge of his accumulated idiocy and wrongdoing, forced to play out a role even he must have been surprised to find was part of his destiny, and maybe the slower for that, and so maybe I would get there in time.

His sweeping fist caught on my forearm, and I put my elbow on his nose with what seemed an inadequate motion. I must have disturbed some of the looser bones of his face, because he cried out again and swayed on his heels. With Antonia blocking his knees, I pulled him forward and he toppled over her to the ground.

As I saw him go down I wondered if he'd just give up, go fetal with a groaning concession, because he had once been a decent guy who must feel pained to be so deeply in the wrong, and taking so much abuse for it. Instead he tried to bite some of my fingers off. Antonia got the stick on him like she'd taken a class for it and I sort of laid on his shoulders, managing an eventual homeschool half nelson and yelling for her to cuff his leg. He thrashed against that idea awhile until finally she gave him a pop on the kneecap and said stop it and he did and we cuffed him to the sinkpipe. Then she crawled out of his range into the dark of the hall, and went promptly to sleep again. Bracing my distended elbow against my side, I lifted her and put her over my shoulder, and we went out into the night and the grimy street, and when halfway down the walk her weight shifted and I thought I would drop her, the gang of kids who had come back again to gape at Goat's shattered car ran over and held her, and helped me bear her on.

“I'd like a cup of tea before bed, I think.”

She leaned back against the cracked headrest, pressing an ice pack to her wrist. Two more hung strapped with blue bands to her knees, the deflated air bag brushing against her legs with the rhythm of the road. Antonia was a towel and a stool away from a postgame interview, but the hospital had said to come back in the morning, it probably wasn't anything more than a mild concussion, and I had saved her, or something like that, or she me. Saving had happened and I'd been there. The worst had been possible and now it wasn't anymore. Now the world was returned again to its customary plenitude of quiet and insidious wrongs ripe to be temporarily overlooked.

“Of course,” I said. “I'll make you some tea.”

“Or maybe some hot milk. My throat burns.”

“I'll get you some nice hot milk,” I said almost automatically, and she looked over at me with faint irony.

“I still don't understand why you made that up about your family.”

I'd confessed in the waiting room, before the ice and the pills, and the tests for her and the sling for me, to keep her awake, because it seemed time, and because she knew anyway. I even made her promise not to tell Calyph, more to save him the embarrassment of having believed me than anything.

“How'd you really grow up?” she asked.

I shrugged. “My father installed water heaters. He and my mom died snowmobiling when I was six. I didn't want to bore you with that.”

“You should have. We'd have hired you anyhow,” she said reproachfully. “You saved our cat.”

Beneath us the car rattled dangerously. I knew it wasn't street-worthy, and soon they would say it was totaled, but I needed a few more miles. I knew it was the last time I'd drive for either of them.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Home,” I said.

She looked at me skeptically, as if to say, I hurt and am cold, don't fuck with me here.

“It's all right,” I said. “He's gone. The place is empty.”

“I don't live there anymore, Jess.”

“You've still got a key, right?”

When we came to the security gates, they were closed, and I tried to remember if I'd done it myself or if that meant he really was gone, searching for me somewhere between the green spaces and the grid with an SUV full of dangerous men. We pulled up the drive and I knew I'd have no answer if the house was blazing with lights, if the police were there. Going around a bend I saw a glow, but it was just a faint spill across the Linux man's lawn—the house was dark and the garage closed. The car knocked terminally to a halt and we sat a moment in the quiet.

“You think he's still chained to the sink?”

I shrugged. I'd called 911 from the hospital and the operator had been confused. “He'll look good in a face mask,” I said. “Guys wear it for style now.”

“I really don't remember doing that to his face.”

“The world leagues will thank you,” I said, and it was true—by January he would be signed by CSKA Moscow.

I undid the child locks and our doors squeaked open. She stood in the drive a moment, looking up at the dark house with the key in her hand.

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I'm sure,” I said.

She walked gingerly up the front steps, the ice melt sloshing around her knees. I told her I'd only be a minute and went around to the back door of the garage. The Jaguar was still there. I put my hand on the hood and it was cold. The tires didn't look newly chalked.

I stepped quickly into the house, where a light bloomed upstairs.

“Hello?” My voice came out hoarsely.

“In the bedroom,” she called.

“Come down and have tea.”

“In a minute.”

I found a kettle and put on some water, and then I went and glanced in a few rooms, looking for any sign of him. Everything was peaceful save for my own disorder—the dried spittle on the photograph looked like Angel Falls. I picked up the poker I'd flung on the floor and put it back in its rack. If only the balcony floor were wooden, I could've gone outside and put a light through the slats and known.

She came down the stairs just as the kettle began to whistle. She'd changed into a mismatched sleep outfit. Her shirt had the name of some electronics store, with a plug coming out of an “s” and wrapping around to underline the name. Her pajama bottoms had shamrocks. The ice packs around her knees had been replaced by two bags of frozen peas.

“I miss that cat,” she announced and went to the fridge for milk.

I tried to go for the tea, but I didn't know where anything was and she shooed me off. “I'm indestructible,” she said. “Sit down. What kind do you want?”

“Earl Grey,” I said, and she smiled a little at the stage quality of the response. When it was ready she gave me the little tray, which I could just manage with one hand, and with the tiny pitcher of cream rattling against the sugar bowl we went up the stairs.

She'd straightened the room so there wasn't any trace of the morning. The bed was made again and the closet door closed. It looked like the master bedroom of any big suburban home, waiting to soften any of ten thousand soft lives.

“Can you believe there was a spear in here? The one from the armor. It was just lying on the floor.”

I put on a broad, quizzical look. Already I was moving over to the curtains, which were just half closed. I couldn't find the line to draw them fully shut, and my hand fumbled uselessly within the fabric.

“What'd you do with it?” I asked, feeling up and down.

“I just rolled it under the bed. There was a first-aid kit under there, too. The bachelor life.”

At last I found the cord. Before drawing the curtains I looked out, but the spill of light was empty and beyond there was nothing visible.

I took up my cup and sipped, gazing down at the stained undershirt I'd stripped down to when they'd put the sling on.

“Have you got a robe or something?”

“Sure.” She went to the closet and drew out a deep-red robe, cut so long of such thick terrycloth that it was halfway to being some animal pelt, fringed with a vestige of the beast.

Handing it to me, she climbed onto the bed, propping the pillows behind her. I thought with familiar longing how easy it would be to put on the robe, to lie next to her and show her the spot on my thigh where her cat had bitten me, boast of breaking into her house, and tell her how tenderly I'd examined her delicate, insensate body. She was very tired, and probably wouldn't take any of it seriously, but who knew how long and how far I could play the role of the usurping husband before the outside world caught up with us? But I knew I had no place with her. She had to learn how to be rich in the America of now, without delusion or embarrassment, and needed to be with those who could show her how. I had to go off and buy a plant or something, and learn how not to kill it or creep it out, and find a new small room to live in, where I could settle at last into my blanched and soon youthless skin, the skin of the past refusing to pass, the skin of obsolete conquerors and indifferent kings.

I slung the robe over my shoulder and went again to the glass, and as Antonia looked at me strangely I unlatched the door and drew it back.

“Who's there,” he said instantly, in a weak, hoarse voice, and at the sound of his voice she gave a short cry.

We heard him scrape to his feet, and again Antonia cried out.

“It's all right,” I said. My voice was casual. I felt nonchalant, with a strange, light feeling of relief.

“I guess he's home after all,” I said. I felt the heft of the robe in my hand, and thought how heavy it would have been around my shoulders. Without it my body was deft and responsive, and I stepped back from the doorway and stood aside to let him through.

Calyph came in rubbing sleep from his eyes. His jacket was smirched and damp with dew, and he looked like a boy whose prom night had gone horribly wrong. I could see him straining to show that nothing bothered him, to have us know that every misfortune weak enough to happen in Dunthorpe was to be soaked up in stride. We exchanged a quick, uneasy glance. I could see his legs shaking through the tight slacks.

“Fell asleep,” he announced.

Antonia lay on the bed, the mug of tea forgotten in her hand.

“Let's get you out of that coat,” I said. I put my hand on his damp shoulder with easy familiarity, and he turned away from his wife and let me take it from him. When I brushed his hand it was as cold as if he'd soaked it in ice water. The tips of his fingers looked swollen and bruised, and I wondered if he'd tried to pry his way back inside.