Читать книгу Blue - Abigail Padgett - Страница 11

Chapter Five

As a rule, bars give me a headache. The music is usually little more than synthesized pounding, and I am always uncomfortable when total strangers sidle up to tell me they haven’t seen me in here before. I mean, what do you say? “That’s because I haven’t been in here before?” The linguistic rules of bars are not rational. I can’t cope.

But Auntie Buck’s Country and Western Bistro, usually just called Auntie’s, isn’t like that. The music is recognizable as music and everybody assumes they’ve seen you before even if they haven’t. A laid-back gay hangout, Auntie’s still serves regular drinks although now practically everybody orders imported water. Non-carbonated, because nobody wants to burp while waltzing to Patsy Cline singing “I Fall to Pieces.” And everybody dances at Auntie’s. The two-step is everything. At Auntie’s the only rule is that if you’re not in a full-body cast you’re expected to dance at least once with anybody who asks.

When Brontë and I arrived, Rox was out on the dance floor already, wearing a spectacular purple-fringed blouse with a vest in gold and white patchwork brocades. I recognized the brocades from a set of upholstery samples BB the Punk had scored from one of his many contacts in the decorating industry. BB could turn practically anything into haute couture, and Rox was his favorite model. A guy in a Stetson leaned over the dance floor rail to tell me proudly that BB was also designing the costumes for Auntie’s competitive line-dance team. For an upcoming tournament the team would be in sequined ecru peasant shirts with Levi’s hand-dyed a particularly difficult shade of malachite green. A Celtic theme. Matching green Irish caps, also sequined, and homespun vests featuring lavish embroidery in Celtic motifs. But with Rox as trainer, Auntie’s team could win wearing baggy boxer shorts, right?

I nodded agreement as Brontë stretched out against the railing to watch. Then with fake enthusiasm I hopped down the three steps to the waxed floor and Roxie Bouchie’s suspicious smile.

“Ready to learn!” I pronounced weakly. Everybody else milling around on the floor was wearing cowboy boots and shirts with at least five mother-of-pearl snaps at the cuffs. I felt bland and underdressed.

“Girl, you must be lost,” Rox said, grinning. “The Society for the Preservation of Boring Clothes meets across the street. To what do I owe the honor of your presence on my dance floor?”

“I need a psych eval,” I admitted. “It’s a woman at Las Colinas. She’s confessed to killing a man. The body in the public freezer out by my place. Her lawyer says she’s crazy.”

“Whoa!” Rox replied, interested. “How did you get involved . . . ? Never mind. You’re gonna have to dance real nice for this, hear?”

“I hear,” I said, taking my place in a row of people whose thumbs were already hooked in the waistbands of their jeans. We were going to learn the Tush-Push, Rox announced as a spotlight clicked on, highlighting her in gold.

Misha, I have a good reason for doing this, I thought into the haze around the yellow light. I pushed the thought on through the ceiling and out into a dark sky beneath which Misha Deland probably was, somewhere.

Misha hated country and western music, although the hillbilly accent she tried to bury under her contrived Bostonese suggested that she might have had some familiarity with it in the past. She said country music reinforced the subservient role of women, who in its lyrics did nothing but sob over abusive husbands who’d run off with other women. The other women, she pointed out, would later sing about empty beer cans and foreclosures on double-wide trailers when the same men ran off with yet other women. Misha would have preferred a classic two-step urging housewives to shoot their husbands and live communally, growing their own food and hammering out social policy at night. I never bothered explaining to her why that two-step wouldn’t work.

Although I know why. It’s one of my favorite notions that the universe is essentially music, and that we came from there. Psy­choneurologists document cases in which people with brain deficits who can’t talk or read or understand words at all can nevertheless sing entire arias after one or two exposures to the music. Mute and autistic idiots savants have surprised their caregivers by sitting down at a piano and playing the themes from every commercial on television in the dayroom that morning. Even the ancient reptile brains of certain snakes respond dramatically to music.

I think music is the original language of life, half buried in the crumpled map of the brain. I think verbal discourse is an evolutionary newcomer, like opposable thumbs and politics. Music about communal utility bills would be like a mountain wearing a sweater. Beyond incongruous. Music has to be, and always is, about joy and despair, illumination and darkness, life and death. Even reptiles know this. But Misha wouldn’t have gotten it.

That is, she wouldn’t have gotten the theory. The practice she had down pat. Everyone said that on a good day Misha could seduce furniture, and it was true. She didn’t mean to be seductive, certainly didn’t cultivate an image suggesting steamy nights in heroin-chic hotel rooms. Scrawny little Misha in a leather bra and crotchless net tights would arouse guffaws from the dead. It wasn’t that kind of seduction.

It was more like an old hunger, deep and lonely and mean. Misha could touch people just by pronouncing their names and then staring at them with those huge gray eyes. Men, women, animals. Everything seemed stunned by some coded message she conveyed. It made her extremely good at her work, which involved organizing, getting people to show up and do things. I have seen the most rampantly macho throwbacks—cops, dry-wallers, tow truck operators—paralyzed with fascination for this butchy little middle-aged woman in designer clothes that never quite fit. Misha’s blouses were always buttoned wrong, the cuffs of her slacks coming untacked at the seams. She never cut the pocket threads of her jackets, but her pockets sagged anyway. She was everybody’s favorite waif, with an attitude.

And, she was music. Minor chord darkness, chaos, something from before even the idea of order. And then a nearly beatific sense of light I could almost see trailing from her fingers. I did see it once, when she touched Brontë’s head that first night at the Emergency Animal Clinic. Misha didn’t either like or dislike animals, and would later forget to feed Brontë half the time. It was something about hurt that made Misha into music. Hurt in others and a scrambled hurt that permeated the woman herself. I never knew what it was about. I did know that I was supposed to make the very strength of my soul available to her, stand with her in some battle raging just beyond my comprehension. I still know that.

“Blue!” Rox yelled over Garth slipping on down to the OH-ay-sis, “that’s slide, step-step, slide, honey. Not step, stop, and stand there.”

“Yes’m,” I shucked back. It was already clear that I wasn’t going to make the line-dance team, but then I look dead in green, anyway.

After an hour I could boast a beginner’s proficiency with three different line dances, although my hair was matted with sweat and I’d have to bury my blouse as soon as I got home.

“Where’s my minnow badge?” I asked Rox when we settled at a table in the back. I ordered an Evian for Brontë and a hazelnut-flavored Italian fizzy thing for me. Rox ordered tap water and took a baggie of soda crackers out of her purse. I thought it was strange, since Rox is usually one of the few who still order drinks with names like Cuba Libre and Singapore Sling.

“No minnow badge,” she said, letting most of her hundred and fifty beaded braids clatter against the tabletop as she leaned into a cracker. “And don’t drink out of my glass. Stupid stomach flu’s just about shut down the prison and me, too. You don’t want it, trust me. I’ve been barfing for two days.”

“What makes you think I’d drink tap water?” I replied.

“Oh, that’s right. Out at your place you squeeze water out of barrel cactus.”

“Actually, the liquid from barrel cactus pulp is poisonous when it’s milky,” I noted. “It’s just one of the reasons I drink the stuff that comes in bottles. So when can you do the psych eval?”

“She’s at Las Colinas.”

“Saturday, but only if her attorney or the court requests it. Have the attorney call me tomorrow at Donovan. How did you get messed up in this thing?”

Fifty people were two-stepping around the dance floor now, some in routines so polished that the rest applauded after a tricky turn or bit of footwork. The best dancers were two gray-haired guys in Wranglers and button-down dress shirts. The president of a small bank and his boyfriend of thirty years, a TV actor easily recognizable for his ongoing role as the bishop-sleuth in a religious detective series. My dad loves the show.

“Her brother showed up at my pool yesterday and hired me to help her,” I told Rox. “How outrageous would it be if I asked Bishop Brannigan to autograph a napkin for my father?”

“Tacky. Most people buy an Auntie’s T-shirt and he autographs that. I didn’t know you had a father. And why would this brother hire you? Hire you to do what?”

“To use my great skills as a social psychologist in proving his sister innocent,” I answered after paying fifteen dollars for a T-shirt. It featured the Wicked Witch of the West in cowgirl drag right down to her ruby-red boots. Beneath was the message, “It’s the shoes, stupid!” The actor signed his name across the back in red laundry marker. Dad would be overjoyed.

“And why would you think I’m the product of an immaculate conception?”

Rox let her head loll to one side and regarded me from tired brown eyes beneath sparkly purple lids. A real, no-bullshit look.

“You know what I mean.”

I did. She meant we’d known each other casually for almost a year since my first mall job. We’d seen each other around, talked on the phone about BB, had lunch a few times. Once I’d gone to Auntie’s with some of the old crowd from my years with Misha, and seen Roxie dancing provocatively with a woman who looked like Alicia Keys. It was safe to say Rox and I were comfortably, if dimly, acquainted.

Now she meant it was time either to open up and acknowledge that we might be friends or else draw the line squarely at our safer acquaintanceship. A dicey decision demanding navigational precision at least equal to that required for brain surgery. I knew she probably wouldn’t have even brought it up if she hadn’t had stomach flu for a week. Sometimes being sick makes people maudlin. The proximity of death and all that. Still, I was flattered.

“My dad’s an Episcopal priest named Jake. He lives in St. Louis,” I offered. “My mother, Elizabeth, was killed in an automobile accident twenty-two years ago. I grew up in a really little town in southern Illinois just across the Missouri state line. Waterloo.”

“Never heard of Waterloo, but we’re homies,” she said with a grin. “Sort of, anyhow. I was born in Chicago, brought up over on the Indiana side in Gary. My mother died when I was young, too. Twenty. God only knows about my peckerwood father.”

“Peckerwood?”

“White, honey, as in good old redheaded Scots-Irish stock. You know, four-chord harmony, plaintive ballads about lakes, ten thousand years of stomp-dancing just like you see on that floor out there. It’s genetic. Inherited. As it happens, I inherited it. Had to hide it from my friends, growing up. They’d have kicked my butt right into Lake Michigan.”

“You think tastes in music are genetic?” I asked, intrigued. It fit right in with my universe theory.

“Girl,” she replied, drawing out the word on purpose, “look at me. Do you see Dolly Parton? No, you don’t. What you see is an African-American woman whose DNA helix has a few codes that didn’t come from Africa. God, I love this music!”

“And you’re a psychiatrist,” I ventured, risking accusations of racism for suggesting that all little black girls in blighted Gary, Indiana, don’t grow up dreaming of the day they’ll prescribe their first antidepressant. “Is your father a doctor, too?”

“I have a picture of him and my mother,” she said, taking her wallet from her purse and showing me an enlargement of one of those photos that come in strips from a booth. The photo had captured a black woman with Rox’s eyes and broad nose, and a white man with Rox’s freckles and big ears. They both looked too young to be anybody’s parents. “I don’t think he was a doctor,” she added. “Probably a steelworker. Mama got a lot of those before the mills shut down.”

“A lot of steelworkers?”

The beads rattled conversationally as she turned her head.

“I was a trick baby. This man was the trick. She said she knew she was pregnant that very night, and kept the picture so I’d know what my daddy looked like. She never remembered his name, probably never even knew it. And maybe she made the whole thing up. That’s very possible, but this dude sure as hell looks like doe-si-doe to me.”

“And the ears, too,” I agreed, ducking the issue of mothers and prostitution entirely. “But why psychiatry?”

“All kinds of genetics,” Roxie mumbled through a soda cracker, curbing further inquiry. “So what about this woman you want me to evaluate? Do you think she’s faking it for an insanity plea? Is that why she confessed, so she’d appear incompetent?”

“I don’t know, Rox. Part of what I saw was a scam, some kind of act. I’m sure of that. On the other hand, there is something wrong with her. She looks like she’s been living on the street for years even though she hasn’t. And the prison has her in a high-security unit despite the fact that this is a first offense and there’s no record of any violent behavior subsequent to her arrest. Why would they do that?”

“Suicide precaution maybe,” Rox suggested. “If they think she’s crazy that’s standard practice. A stripped cell, no sharp objects, belts, cords, or shoelaces. A guard will check on her every twenty minutes.”

“But they let her wear this grungy old Shirley Temple wig . . .”

“I can’t think of any way to commit suicide with a wig, can you?”

Wig suicide was not a concept I had ever entertained. Suicide itself was not a concept I had ever entertained, even on the night I came home to the beach apartment Misha and I shared for two years, and she was gone. Misha, her clothes, books, and complete collection of Ms. magazines in Mylar slipcases, gone. There was a note taped to the refrigerator. “I’m sorry that . . .” had been scratched out in favor of We’ll always be together. I know you and Brontë will be okay. It was signed merely, M, as was Misha’s habit.

There was never any question of Brontë and me not being okay. Brontë is a dog and I’m not exactly unfamiliar with surviving the loss of loved ones, as they say. You just go on. Mothers die, brothers become felons, soulmates vanish without warning. I was in shock, but knew I wouldn’t die. Explanations were necessary, however. Some sort of accounting for the roaring in my ears and a sense that the only thing keeping me from a fall that would never end was my personal belief in the floor. The kitchen floor, in the kitchen, where there was a phone. It was ringing.

“Misha met someone at a conference several months ago,” I was told minutes later by the ex-nun editor of a feminist journal that published mostly translations of foreign articles about the role of women in the banking industry. The journal was so boring it was unreadable, and the editor, a nondescript woman in wire-frame glasses whose name I could never remember, was a friend of Misha’s.

Elaine Dennis. Or Denise Edsel. Something like that. She never came to our apartment and I assumed Misha saw her for lunch during the week occasionally. Now she was telling me that Misha had fallen head-over-heels for a multilingual grant writer who had just left the country for some project in New Zealand. She was telling me that Misha had gone, too.

No one among our mutual friends knew about the grant writer, but no one was surprised, either. In the following days they brought me pasta salads and sighed. Misha had always been so intense, they said. So odd. A bird of passage. Remember that time she couldn’t remember her maiden name when somebody asked her and then burst into tears at the English Department reception? Later she’d been seen defacing Republican bumper stickers in the Business School parking lot. Misha was, well, not always entirely appropriate, although God knew she could charm the socks off the pope when she wanted to. And she’d done such a great job with the Women’s Studies Consortium, and how difficult this must be for me, and blah, blah, blah.

I was numb. Then unbearably hurt. Then homicidally angry. Then numb again. I did take Brontë that weekend and drive as far as Mesquite, Nevada, before turning back. The plan had been to lose myself in some desert ghost town where no one had lived since the borax mine played out in 1947. I would waitress in a derelict truck stop with a flyblown picture of Willie Nelson on the wall. My only customers would be escaped convicts and local Native Americans exuding wordless understanding. Eventually I would publish a series of stark but transcendent essays about getting drunk and lying in ditches beside roads traversed only by tumbleweeds. Readers would be brought to their knees by my uncompromising metaphors of loss.

But people raised in the Midwest do not lie drunk in ditches writing about tumbleweeds. It just doesn’t happen. I had classes to teach on Monday. So I turned around and drove home, sick and sobbing and scared. Then I called Dad, who flew out the following weekend and helped me move to Wren’s Gulch. When he’d left and I was alone in the desert, I decided to kill Misha in my mind. I instructed everyone never to mention her name. I would not think of her beyond the most superficial level. The sort of level required by the fact that she’d forgotten to take her gallon bottle of windshield cleaner refill and about three hundred knee-high nylons I found on the floor of her closet. Suicide with or without hairpieces was never an option for me, but a sort of murder was. Somehow it didn’t seem like a good time to explain this to my pal, the psychiatrist.

“Muffin might die if she ate the wig,” I suggested as Rox scowled into her tap water.

“Nah.” She sighed. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff people swallow and don’t die. The stomach is an amazing organ. At least most stomachs are. Mine is just whining to go home.”

Brontë seemed reluctant to leave in the middle of Mary Chapin Carpenter, but I suspected that had more to do with the popcorn people kept slipping her than the song. Like most dogs, she prefers opera.

“So I’ll have the lawyer call you at work tomorrow,” I reminded Rox as we hit the cool night air of the street.

“Yeah, sure.” She seemed thoughtful.

“Blue?”

“Yeah?”

“What’s your brother in for?”

“Armed robbery,” I answered, veering off toward my truck. “He held up a bank. Shot a vase. I don’t know why.”

“Poor bastard,” she said, smiling over her shoulder before van­ishing into the shadow of a potted oleander by the curb.

An hour and a half later I was home and there were three messages on the machine: one from Dan Crandall saying he’d be by at ten tomorrow to talk about Muffin’s case. One from the owner of the vegetarian restaurant wanting to know if I’d had a chance to look at the terrible sales data he’d given me. And one from Father Jake, who sounded like he’d just had drinks with the Holy Ghost. I was too interested in his message to wonder why Brontë was dashing back and forth across the carpet, sniffing and growling. A field mouse had been there, probably.

“Betsy Blue,” my father’s voice announced, using a childhood endearment, “it’s good news. Your brother has found someone to love, and I think it’s going to make a difference. A big difference. Call you tomorrow with details. Love you. Bye now.”

“Oh, God,” I said to the answering machine as Brontë barked at my filing cabinet, which I thought in all likelihood contained the field mouse. Then I went for a quick swim and fell in bed trying not to think about what had happened to BB the Punk. About the sort of “love” my brother might find in a prison. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be like the banker and the actor at Auntie’s.

Brontë was still sniffing and casting concerned looks in my direction when I fell asleep and into what would become a recurrent dream. Misha hurrying up the steps of an old stone house on a residential street, agitated, maybe scared. Looking over her shoulder but not seeing me as I tried to call out to her but couldn’t. I had no voice. It was like I wasn’t really there. In that first dream I wanted to cry with disappointment.

I did cry, actually. Although it was dawn when I woke up sniffling. Dreams, like the grid, have a sort of funky disdain for linear time. But I wondered where I’d been in that flatland between an image of Misha dredged from my own brain for the first time in two years, and what should have been an immediate response to that image—grief. I was pondering the question when I realized Brontë had not come to bed.

She was still in the office/living room. I could see her through my open bedroom door, her nose resting on outstretched paws and pointing to something lodged in the carpet against the side of my filing cabinet.

First light in the desert is more felt than seen, even inside bankrupt motels. An abrupt shift from the otherworld of shadows and skittering silence to a real world at once comforting and banal. Then things come into focus with jarring speed.

What came into my focus was a small bright blue capsule being watched by a Doberman. Cerulean blue, I decided as gooseflesh crept up my arms. Nobody had been in my living room in two weeks and I hadn’t been sick since I moved. There was nothing in my medicine cabinet but generic aspirin substitute, natural vitamins I rarely remembered to take, and some worm pills from the vet that Brontë hadn’t needed in years. None of these was bright blue. I knew I had never seen, anywhere, a pill like the one nestled unaccountably in my carpet.

Still, it seemed ludicrous to be shivering in fear at the presence of a toy-colored pill, so I picked it up. “Inderal LA 160,” was etched in a wide light blue stripe around the overcap. The smaller half of the capsule sported three narrower light blue stripes.

There is no television at Wren’s Gulch Inn because I prefer books. But Misha loved CNN, so our apartment had cable and we sometimes watched killer dramas because she liked to cheer when the bad guy finally fell into a vat of boiling molasses or was run over by an armored car full of zany manicurists. From these dramas I had learned what to do with striped blue capsules found in my carpet. I dropped it into a zip-lock sandwich bag.

Brontë seemed relieved and immediately headed for bed. I joined her after checking my files and finding nothing amiss, but I didn’t go back to sleep. I was listing the phone calls I had to make as soon as the hour was decent. One of them would involve finding out what Inderal was, because the information might be useful in determining who had been in my living room without my knowledge. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that at all.