Wolf Point Page 13

  “What did he do for a living?”

  “Mailman,” she said, and laughed. “Figures, doesn’t it?”

  “And Ronnie?”

  “Nothing. Mostly always broke, bumming money from everyone. Worked manual labor for the county when he could.”

  “And Chucky was the CPA.”

  “Uncle Chuck,” she said. “Chucky’s the man with the money. He’s the one everybody goes to when they need something. He’s generous like that. Gives everybody money, never asks for it back. Takes care of his family, which is what everybody says about him: Chucky takes care of his family.”

  T moved his thumbs up along her neck into her hairline. He massaged the back of her head.

  “I told everyone that Chucky only took pictures. Even during the trial, I couldn’t bring myself—even though it might have helped Babs. I still felt this kind of thing with Chuck, like, I couldn’t do it. But he didn’t only take pictures,” she said. “Ever since I can remember, far back as I can remember, he would give me baths. My parents would be around. They were always like, Chuck’s giving the baby her bath … Meanwhile, he’d be sliding his fingers into me. He used to tell me, you need to be clean in there. And then there’d be other things… There’d always be some reason, and then the present: a dress, money.” She was silent a long while before she turned again to look up at T. “I’m sure he damaged me,” she said. “Doctors say they don’t see anything physical, but, you know, I feel it. And I know what he used to do, so— That’s what I think, fuck what they say. I’m sure he did something to me.” She paused a moment and then added, “I always did look forward to the presents, and it’s not like, probably always, I didn’t know— but I was just a baby.” She closed her eyes again, and then was silent.

  T continued gently massaging her scalp, and then her forehead and temples. Through the uncurtained and ornately framed window above the tub, sunlight came into the bathroom and cast a pinkish-orange hue against the walls and down into the corners, where dust gathered. From the light, he guessed it was late afternoon. He could smell the wood smoke from the bedroom fireplace, even there in the humid air of the bath, with the softness of Jenny’s body against his chest and the hard porcelain of the tub against his back. The bath water had cooled to tepid, and he considered for a moment offering to heat up another pail, but then realized he didn’t want to get out of the tub. He didn’t want to let go of Jenny, whom he was holding now with his arms around her and his hands clasped over her stomach.

  In the bath with Jenny, her body willing under his touch, it was easy to forget the last few years, which were coming quickly to feel like a darkness, a shadow behind him. He held her head in his hands and ran the tips of his fingers over her mouth and nose and eyes. She had drifted off into a peaceful stillness, from which she stirred slightly. When he kissed the back of her head and pressed his lips into her hair, she said, “You’re very intense, you know that?”

  “Me?” he said. “I’m moved— By what you told me.”

  She was quiet a moment and then asked, “Could you be with someone— Someone with my kind of problems, my kind of history?”

  “What do you mean by be with, Jenny? You can’t get much more with someone then we are at the moment.”

  “We’re not with each other at all,” she said. “We’re just messing around; we’re just passing through.”

  “This is getting too cryptic for me.”

  “It’s not cryptic. Could you ever have a relationship with someone like me, a serious relationship?”

  “If I weren’t more than thirty years older than you,” he said, “there wouldn’t be any problem. No problem at all.”

  “You’re hung up on the age thing.” She took his hands in hers and wrapped them around her tightly. “I feel a connection with you. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt anything like it before, to be honest.” She pushed her body back into his and covered her breasts with his hands. “Plus,” she looked up at him mischievously, “you’re rich. What else could a girl want?”

  “Youth,” T said. “The possibility of sharing a full life with someone.”

  “I’ll take any life I can get,” she fired back. “This idiotic mess I was born to—really,” she said.

  T pulled the bath plug. “Water’s getting cold. How are you feeling?”

  “Better.” She toyed with the bubbles. “You make me better.”

  T got out of the tub, found a dry towel, and held it up for her.

  “Ooh,” she said. “Just like royalty.”

  “Lester,” he said, drying her shoulders and back, “Lester’s negotiating for sixty grand.”

  “Sixty?” She turned to face him. “He only stole forty. I told you that. He’s asking you to give him sixty thousand?”

  “You didn’t know he’d ask for sixty?” T said. “I thought you might have discussed it before we went fishing.”

  “No,” she said. “We didn’t talk about that. Did he say why he wanted that much?”

  “He says you both could use the extra to get yourself settled after you pay off this Short Willie character.” He patted the towel between her breasts. “Is that really the guy’s name?”

  “Really,” she said. “Lester does have a point. Those assholes did ten thousand worth of damage to my house, easy.” She took a towel from the sink and began to dry T’s back as he bent over to dry her stomach and thighs. “Can you afford that much?” she asked. “Is that possible?”

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  “But can you afford it?” she pressed. “Can you get your hands on that much cash?”

  “That’s not a problem.”

  “Really? How? How do you do something like that, just come up with that much cash?”

  “I can arrange a bank wire,” he said. “All we need to do is find the local bank. It’s not a problem.”

  “What a different world you live in.” She kissed him, a peck on the lips. “Not a problem,” she said. “Sixty thousand dollars.”

  Between the fire and the heat of the afternoon, the bedroom felt like a sauna, and T went immediately to the windows, which he opened top and bottom. He joined Jenny where she had thrown herself onto the bed. They lay naked a while side by side, holding hands, each staring at the ceiling, before Jenny turned to cuddle closer to him. “God,” she said, “I’m so comfortable with you.”

  T rested the palm of his hand on the base of her spine, his fingers reaching to the softer flesh. He said, “Let’s say we went to the bank Monday morning and I arranged for the money. Would you want to go back to Chattanooga then, with Lester and the cash?”

  “I guess,” she said. “I guess I’d have to. No way I’d trust him to make the arrangements by himself.”

  “What arrangements?”

  “He can’t just walk up to Short Willie with a bag full of money. They’d kill him and take the money, and then— I don’t know where I’d stand then.”

  “So what kind of arrangements?” T asked again.

  “We’d have to find a middleman to make a deal. I don’t know what Willie’s going to want. Anything’s possible with him. He might say, Okay, I won’t kill you, but you’ve got to give me fifty thousand and leave the country. Or, Give me the money back, along with your right hand.”

  “Your right hand?”

  “Believe me, T. This guy is so fucked up. I’m terrified of him. He’s capable of absolutely anything.”

  “Your right hand,” T repeated. “Really?”

  “Or worse. He might want his balls. With Willie, like I said—”

  “Okay,” T said. “So, how would you get back to Chattanooga? What were you thinking?”

  “We could take the Rover,” she said, her hand casually moving over his sex, cupping it before following a line of hair up his stomach. “You could wait for me here. After we give the money back, I could make arrangements to have my house taken care of, and then I could come back for you. We could probably do the whole thing in three or four days.”

 
; “And then what?” T said. “After you’re back here. Then what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s an adventure. What did you have in mind?” She climbed on top of him, lining up her legs and torso with his so that no part of her touched the bed. “A guy my own age,” she said, grinning, “they’d be pinning me down and raping me by now, I tried to stop them. They wouldn’t give a damn. But an older guy like you— You have control. I get to play with you,” she said, pressing her breasts against his chest and kissing him on the lips. “This is nice,” she continued. “We can cuddle and touch and I don’t have to, you know. I mean, not every time, we don’t absolutely have to do the wild thing.”

  “The wild thing,” T said, repeating Jenny thoughtlessly. He stroked her hair and drops of water fell onto his chest. “Have you ever been to Crete?” he asked.

  “Where’s that?”

  “Greece,” he said. “Off the tip of Greece.”

  Jenny laughed. “I went to New York City once when I was a little girl. We went to the top of the World Trade Center. Mostly though I haven’t left the South.”

  “Crete’s beautiful,” he said. “I have a villa there. It’s a cottage, really—but I call it my villa. I could take you to Crete and be the envy of all the Greek men.”

  “Because of me?” she said coyly.

  “You know because of you.”

  “You really have a house there? Who takes care of it?”

  “A local couple,” he said.

  “Do you go a lot?”

  “Used to,” T said. He was about to say before the arrest, but caught himself in time. “I haven’t been in a few years now. Do you think you’d like something like that? Living in Crete for a while?”

  She kissed him on the lips. “It sounds like a dream.” She rolled off him and snuggled into his side, her head against his neck. “It sounds like a fantasy, something that couldn’t possibly come true.”

  “All you’d have to do is come back and get me,” T said, after a second, his eyes on the ceiling. “We could fly from here. Just…go.”

  “You’re like a dream,” Jenny said. “Tell me more things we could do.”

  “Actually,” T said, “we’d have to get you a passport first. And I’d have to go pick up mine in Salem.”

  “Salem?”

  “Virginia. Where I have a house. Where I’ve been living.”

  T felt Jenny nod, and when he turned to look at her he saw that she was falling asleep. He pulled a sheet up from the foot of the bed and draped it over their midsections, leaving feet and torsos exposed. “Jenny?” he said.

  “Um, hmm.”

  “Remember the older woman I told you about? The one I had an affair with when I was your age?”

  “Um-hmm.”

  “She would never tell me her age, but I guessed she was forty-one, and I used to do this counting thing where I’d tell myself: when I’m thirty-one, she’ll be fifty-one; when I’m forty-one, she’ll be sixty-one.”

  Jenny laughed, a small, quiet laugh.

  “Have you done that?” he asked. “With me?”

  She shook her head.

  “When you’re thirty-three,” he said. “I’ll be sixty-seven. When you’re forty-three, I’ll be seventy-seven—if I’m lucky. Males in my family generally don’t make it past seventy-five. My father died at sixty-six.”

  “T,” she said softly, in a whisper, “right now I’m just trying to get to tomorrow.”

  “You’ll get there,” he said. “I promise. I give you my word.”

  Jenny nuzzled into him closer. “You’ll do it, then?” she whispered. “You’ve decided? You’ll get us the money?”

  He nodded. “I’ll do it for you.”

  She kissed him on the neck. “I’m so sleepy,” she said. “Hold me. Take a nap with me.”

  T pulled the sheet over their shoulders and held Jenny in his arms. From outside, beyond the window, came the chatter of squirrels and then the coughing sound of a small engine being pull-started and then the growl of the engine as it caught and Lester, he assumed, revved it a few times before dropping the prop into the water, signaled by a change in tone, a deepening, before it began to move away, the sound eventually diminishing to silence.

  . 3 .

  Tlay in bed looking up at Lester, who stood over him pointing a gun at his head. He had awakened to Lester tapping the barrel of the gun gently but persistently against his forehead, as if knocking softly on a closed door. He had awakened calmly and fully, with a sense of simply appearing in a dark room in the middle of a scene. First he wasn’t there. Then he was. Their eyes met and for several seconds they stared at each other in silence. Jenny cuddled alongside T, spooning him, her arm around his chest, her cheek against the back of his neck, her breath shallow and soft. There wasn’t as much as a glow left in the embers of the fireplace, but still the wood-smoke odor filled the bedroom, and the wind, which had picked up again, hummed in the chimney. What light there was in the room, the light in which T watched Lester’s expression, came from outside, through the open window, from the bright fields of stars and an orange moon that hovered low and full on the horizon.

  The gun in Lester’s hand was small and black, maybe six or seven inches long from the hammer, which was cocked, to the barrel, which floated a foot away from T’s head, aimed at the bridge of his nose. It was a sleek, attractive weapon, with a silvery trigger curved like a crescent moon inside the black circle of the trigger guard. Lester’s thumb rested on the hammer. His fingers were wrapped around the butt of the gun, one finger looped through the trigger guard, behind the trigger. T lifted his head and rested it comfortably in the palm of his hand, his elbow pressed into the pillow—a gesture meant to prompt an explanation from Lester, as if to say, Well? What next? Lester let the gun drop to his side. His eyes moved from T to Jenny. They followed the length of her body, from the spill of her hair over the pillow, down her bare shoulders and back, and along her thighs and legs to her feet. He seemed to swallow her with his eyes. His face softened and his mouth opened just slightly as if to release a small, silent moan. Then he looked again at T, tucked the gun into the waistband of his pants, and left the room without a word.

  T settled his head down again in the pillow and pushed his body back into the warmth of Jenny’s body. Part of him thought it might be a good idea simply to go back to sleep, though the further he traveled toward wakefulness the more concerned he became about Lester pointing a gun at his head. He had been in the midst of a dream when Lester so disturbingly called him back to the world. In the dream he had been right where he really was, lying next to Jenny in bed, and he had actually thought he was awake—but now he remembered a moment in which a crowd of strangers had gathered around the bed and he had walked away from them and wandered into an abandoned house, a destroyed place that had once been beautifully appointed with furniture and art but now was a hodgepodge of rubble, everything battered and broken and smashed. He wandered uneasily through the house, sad at the loss, and then he was aware, with a growing sense of terror, of a presence, a force, and all he knew for sure was that the force or presence was ominous and that it was responsible for the destruction and that if he didn’t get out of the house, it would destroy him too. Then a couple of things happened quickly. First, in looking for an exit, he had come upon a room with a little boy in it, a boy barely a toddler, who was frightened, and in the dream T was unable to comfort him. Then Jenny walked into the room and picked up the child and carried him out of the house, with T following. The dream left him wonderfully calm—which was why, he guessed, he had reacted with such composure to the sight of Lester standing over him with a gun.

  That he had dreamed anything at all surprised him, given he had stopped dreaming since leaving New York—or at least he had stopped remembering his dreams. When he was young, he used to have nightmares all the time, so much so that for a while around age nine or ten he had been afraid to go to bed at night. He’d dream of terrifying monsters in the bedroom, demons
behind walls. In what he’d since decided must have been a regular if temporary psychotic state that came about when fear awakened him just enough to keep him suspended midway between sleep and dream, he’d hear the heavy-footed approach of monsters as clearly as birdsong in the morning and equally real. When he’d try to scream, he’d produce a dry rasp. His father, a naturally cold man with little interest in his son, didn’t want to hear about it. Once he carried T crying up the stairs to his room and literally threw him down onto his bed. He told him to be a man, then turned out the lights and slammed the door as he left. His mother took him to see Father Cardinale, who told him to pray to Jesus before going to sleep each night and ask him to take away the dreams. He did. Jesus didn’t. The lucid dreams persisted on and off through his twenties. Once, in college, he awoke crawling across his dormroom carpet, trying to escape something. Once, spending the night with Carolyn at her house, he’d leaped from her bed and stumbled out of her bedroom before finally awakening in a dark hall.

  Eventually the power of the dreams diminished until, all the years with Alicia, he had dreamed rarely, and the last year in Salem, he hadn’t dreamed at all. When his daughter, Maura, turned out to have the same problem, he’d understood that it was simply something built into his nature and not a matter of having an uncaring father or an ineffectual mother. Maura had the same horrid dreams, perhaps even more intensely since she complained of waking hallucinations, of seeing things in the corners of her vision that she knew weren’t there. Once she told him she had lain in bed for a half hour in the morning listening to a lovely piano concerto, only to realize on her way to the shower that it had all been in her head. She had heard it, she said, with absolute clarity. Neither he nor Maura was crazy, but they both, in their youth at least, had violent minds, violent in that they threatened to break through the boundaries between what was real and what wasn’t. Maura subjugated hers with a regimen of study and extracurricular activities that kept her intensely busy every waking minute of her young life. He understood this. A disorderly mind required an orderly world to keep it in check. He hadn’t figured out a similar tack until much later in life, when he discovered the world of business.