Tampico (James A. Michener Fiction Series) (13 page)

“Nothing suspicious then.”

“You’ve got some idea about that?”

“Not really,” I said. “I wonder if he was a good pilot.”

“Most of them are,” Warren said. “Or were.”

I’d decided from the beginning that I wouldn’t dress up if I didn’t have to, though I’d bought a suit and a new sport jacket and a few ties, imaginings of fancy parties at which I’d provide security for the fine jewels or white collar investigations in Boston. In Provincetown, it had always been casual or inventive, a thrift-shop style, the artistic or the camp of the gay influence: anything goes, so long as you wear it boldly. I wore chinos and a dark blue cotton sweater, no tennis shoes, but oxfords. The pants felt a little loose, and I slipped them and the shoes off and weighed myself, then realized I had no measure. The scale was dusty and my sock prints were there when I stepped off of it. I went to the bathroom mirror, looking for evidence, but only my healthy face stared out at me. Come on, I thought, it’s just over a year. I left the house then and drove to Taunton.

The nose of the Cadillac peeked out suspiciously from behind the fruit stand, and as I passed it I thought anyone else passing would surely notice it
too. But the road was empty, the last of the fallen oak and beech leaves strewn in the road blew up at my fenders, and I figured the place would be good enough for our business. I slowed and turned into the mouth of a dirt driveway where the road crested, then backed out into it and headed down through the canopy of trees again until I could see the stand coming up in the distance on the right. The road continued in a straight line beyond it, a few farmhouses at the ends of long driveways, and to the left I could see marshland and fallow cornfields through the skeletal weave of bare branches. My tires crunched in the gravel as I pulled off the shoulder and I parked in front of the stand, in clear view, my car blocking sight of the other one from the road.

She was sitting behind the wheel, her face hidden in its structures, the tight white basket of her hair visible above it, and I saw her small hands gripping the top of the wheel and thought she must be a very old woman though I knew better. Then I reached the side of the car, and when I leaned down and looked in I saw her child’s face and that her hair was light blond streaked with platinum. She turned to face me, a sea green on her lids, and smiled tentatively, and I could see the edges of her perfect teeth surrounded by red which was itself surrounded by a thin dark line defining her lips. I heard the click, saw her hand come back to the wheel, then opened the heavy door and slid in on the leather.

“Thank you,” she said, lowering her eyes.

“Well, it’s nothing yet,” I said.

“But I mean for coming.”

Her voice was high and wavering and there was a deep breathiness under it that seemed sexual, but learned. And the voice went with her costume, that seemed really that, as if she were a child in dress up, ready for one of those exploitation ads, the darkest of all pornography. She wore a green knit dress over lime-colored underwear, the bra silken and loose, just hints of shadows under the weave, and an emerald choker circled her white neck, thick as a dog collar, and I saw green coral on her fingers and at her wrists. Her nails were green too and just at the edge of prostitution. She saw me looking and smiled faintly, and I knew many others had looked and that she was used to that, and when she spoke she was fighting against some automatic flirtation, knowing that my look too had been automatic, the very thing she was dressed up for.

“He buys my clothes,” she said. “It’s all I get to wear. And he follows me too, to make sure I’m in them.”

“What?” I said.

“He has me followed.”

“Just a minute.”

I got out of the car and moved to the front of the fruit stand. It was boarded up and the wooden outdoor racks that held the fruit in season were covered with plywood that had been tacked down with thin nails. I looked left and right. There were thin woods on both sides, and I could see for a good distance into them. Then I moved over the gravel to the road and crossed it and stepped down below the shoulder on the other side to where the trees started. They ended in a few feet, at the edge of a steep embankment, below which was an old dirt track running parallel to the road, between it and the marsh. I could see out over the wavering cattails to the cornfields in the distance.

I stepped carefully down the embankment, and when I reached the narrow road and looked up it, I saw the end of the car at a turning about fifty yards away. It was a Volkswagen bug, one of the last imported, and its plates were Massachusetts. Then I heard laughter, a woman’s voice, and when I looked into the marsh I could see the cattails parting and dipping. The young woman came out of the marsh then and climbed up to the brink of the road, a fist full of tall tails, and after she’d looked toward the car to orient herself, she turned and saw me.

“Oh, hello!” she said. “We’re picking cattails.”

“I can see that,” I said. “Looks like good luck.”

A voice from the marsh called out, “Andy?”

“That’s my name,” she said. “Hello! Yes! I’m over here!”

Then a young man emerged from the long weeds. He, like the woman, wore jeans and a flannel shirt and boots with lacings. They stood beside each other, their tails blooming from their fists, and grinned at me.

“Hey,” I said, turning. “Have a nice day.”

When I slid back into the Cadillac, she was watching me intently as if I might be bringing bad news, and I realized the shape she was in and that it wasn’t very good at all and that she’d been working to control herself.

“It’s okay,” I said, lifting my hands and pushing the palms at her. “Just some cattail pickers.” Then she was talking.

She was thirty years old and had been married to him for ten years, a certain Michael Plummer, who had once been a plumber, but was already a wealthy and successful plumbing contractor when they met. Her name was Erica.

“He’s in toilets,” she said. “That’s what he says, and once he put my head down into one, just for the fun of it, and to teach me a lesson.”

He was fifty now, but she’d been a child when they’d married, really that, and she’d liked the way he’d dressed her up and had given her money and the way he’d taken her places, vacations to islands and to resorts in New Mexico, but she hadn’t been liking it for quite a while now, and when he’d found that out it had pleased him, her unhappiness, and he’d worked to increase it, getting her up in clothes like this, and jewels, and forcing her into the color combinations of her makeup. “Even photographs,” she said. “He takes pictures. Not sex. He doesn’t do that anymore. But for a measurement, the ways he likes me. Then if I don’t get it right, he hits me, pushes food into my face. And if I talk to anyone at all and he finds out about it, he has a strap and handcuffs.” She leaned toward the door, her fingers brushing her buttocks. “Do you want to see?”

“No,” I said. “Do you have any relatives?”

“There’s no one,” she said.

I asked her if she’d ever called the police, and she shuddered. Once she had, and they’d joked and laughed in the doorway, and he was still laughing when the door was closed and when he had her by the hair and was dragging her, across the carpet, right over the furniture and the sills and the fine Italian tile. And that’s when he pushed her head down in the toilet, his foot on the base of her spine, and was still laughing.

“What about Provincetown?”

“I’m glad I did,” she said. “He was fishing with his friends and I had a few drinks, and that’s what got me to the police station. Then I got scared and left, and that’s when that man gave me your number.”

“Do you have any money?” I said.

“Money?”

She lifted her leather purse from the seat between us, unzipped it, and opened the mouth. It was full of money, bricks of twenties and tens with rubber bands around them. She pushed the purse toward me.

“Take it,” she said.

I reached over, brushing her fingers as I pulled the flap closed, and she jerked her hand away, then lowered her eyes, embarrassed.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Christ, don’t be. It’s understandable,” I said, and then we sat there, both breathing deeply, looking at each other, and when I thought she had settled down and we could talk in some reason, I laid the whole thing out for her.

I asked her for the name of a shopping center in Taunton and a store, then
wrote them down. The keys would be in the ashtray and the driver’s door would be open and she’d know the car as the one with a playing card in view on the dash. I’d rent the car under an assumed name, but she didn’t have to remember that, but only the motel name in Providence. The papers would be in the glove compartment. And she didn’t have to remember the lawyer’s name either. He’d mention mine when he called and she’d know it was him.

“It’s better this way,” I said. “That I don’t actually take you, that you leave him on your own. Then there’s no question of coercion should it come to trial. The lawyer’s a good one, you’ll see. And I’ll be in touch with him. You might have to stay there for a week or so, maybe even more, until the papers are served. I’ll watch that too.”

“And him,” she whispered. “You’d better watch him.”

“I will, indeed,” I said. “And closely. Do you have any more money?”

“Yes,” she said. “A lot. I’ve been saving it.”

“Take all of it. Every last penny.”

Tomorrow was too soon, because she had to get ready, her personal papers and whatever ones of his she could safely get her hands on, and some proper clothes and anything else she could think of, and when I suggested the next day, she laughed lightly, her face brightening briefly in the first anticipation of some possible freedom in her future. The first time in a long time, I thought.

“But it’s Thanksgiving!” she said, and I was taken aback, then back down the road I’d traveled to get there, bouquets of dried corn hanging from door knockers and pumpkins on stoops. Christ, I thought, I have no family at all, no reason for the holiday, just like her.

But she had his friends coming over, men just as crude as he was, and he insisted that she cook and bake for the lot of them and that everything be right in the holiday spirit and that she hum to herself, holiday songs, as she cleaned up after them and they watched the football games on the large-screen television and drank beer and laughed and insulted each other, arguing the fine points of plays and players as if they knew something about them.

“How about Friday, then?”

“No,” she said. “And not the weekend either. He’ll take all the days off. Probably he’ll take me out somewhere on Saturday, but all day Sunday he’ll lay around.”

She was counting the days now, excited in naming them, most probably searching for moments in them, ways she would pack and hide things, get
herself ready, and in the light coming in at the window I could see the delicate bones in her face as they pushed up through expression of her new animation. There was a child in there, but a woman too under the knit and silk trappings, the bloody lipstick and lime, a free woman who, unlike a battered plaything, could be a child again, at least in the unfettered power of her imagination. Light touched her high and angular cheeks, and the skin over the edge of her skeletal jaw looked like hard ivory, and then she turned to face me.

“Okay,” I said. “Is it Monday, then?”

“Yes!” she said.

“All right!”

We sat grinning at each other, both of us vibrating a little. I’d caught it from her, the opening into a new world, and I liked the feel of it. I could imagine the travail that lay ahead for her, but in the moment that seemed secondary. Then it must have come to her imagination too, but before her smile slipped completely she lowered her head and reached for the purse.

She counted out the money on the fine leather seat between us, and I was careful not to forget anything. I told her I’d figure in the mileage later, when we worked out the final bill. I took six days in advance as retainer, and we shook hands over the cash in the open purse, grinning again. Then I opened the door and got out and walked back to my car. I heard the Cadillac’s engine rush into life as I climbed in, then saw Erica wave through the windshield as she passed in front of me. She turned down the empty road toward town, leaves rising in a russet cloud behind her, and I started my car up and drove away in the other direction, toward Fall River.

I crossed the Sagamore bridge and headed down the mid-Cape highway thinking of Thanksgiving and the monstrosity it would be for Erica, though a last holiday occasion of that kind if she were lucky. I am, I thought, nothing quite like that in my life, and soon after I’d passed Dennis I had a menu and a shopping list, everything that had rested on the table, once my mother had carried it all in. I reached the Orleans rotary and turned off and drove to the Stop and Shop, and by the time I was loading the bags into the trunk the sun was sinking and the stillness of dusk was in the trees on their little islands in the parking lot. Tomorrow, I thought, I would have been going to Boston with Gordon Strickland. It seemed an odd day to have planned that, right before the holiday, and once I’d closed the trunk and climbed into the car, I searched my wallet for the directions.

The house was at the end of a long dirt road, bayberry and beach plum bushes dipping in at the shoulders, and before I came in sight of it, up on a slight promontory at the bay’s edge, I’d had to turn my lights on to see the ruts and turnings. The sun had gone down into a cloud bank at the horizon, and though it was just after four, it was dark as the end of evening. My headlights swept the windblown scrub guarding the house from clear view as I turned in at the drive, and they met another light, something dim on the far side, and I turned them off as I rolled to a stop, my tires crunching in shells where the drive ended in a parking area. There was no car there, and I realized I’d not asked Warren about one. Had Strickland driven himself to the airport?

I climbed out, pushing the door closed carefully until the lock clicked, then stepped along the stone pathway that led to the small front porch. There was no light in the fixture above the door, and the windows beside it were closed and locked. The pathway led to both sides of the house, and I took the right branch, touching the wooden shingles and ducking below the window frames as I headed toward the side, and when I got there and turned, a stiff wind hit against my chest as it rushed in off the bay. I could see the light ahead, a glow in a window where the house ended, a cement column supporting a broad, open deck, its edge visible, and I could hear something, music I thought, dissonant and carried on the wind. The pathway descended, cut down into the earth, and soon I was below the shingles and touching the house foundation, and when I reached the window and was under it, the sill was high up and beyond my fingertips and the music was louder and I thought I could feel it through my hands. I looked to the right and saw the oak tree, above the steep embankment, and turned and went back up the path, then stepped beyond it and worked my way through scrub pine and honeysuckle until I reached the tree. It was an easy climb and I needed no more than a few feet, and soon I was settled into a crotch in the branches and was looking in at the window.