Bag of Bones (65 page)

It was an old Don Henley song, one driven by a really nasty guitar riff.

“Oh God, I love this one,” Mattie cried. The Frisbee came to her. She caught it, dropped it, stepped on it as if it were a hot red spot falling on a nightclub stage, and began to shake. She put her hands first behind her neck and then on her hips and then behind her back. She danced standing with the toes of her sneakers on the Frisbee. She danced without moving. She danced as they say in that song—like a wave on the ocean.

“The government bugged the men's room
,

in the local disco lounge,

And all she wants to do is dance, dance . . .

To keep the boys from selling
,

all the weapons they can scrounge
,

And all she wants to do, all she wants to do is dance.”

Women are sexy when they dance—incredibly sexy—but that wasn't what I reacted to, or how I reacted. The lust I was coping with, but this was more than lust, and not copeable. It was something that sucked the wind out of me and left me feeling utterly at her mercy. In that moment she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, not a pretty woman in shorts and a middy top dancing in place on a Frisbee, but Venus revealed. She was everything I
had missed during the last four years, when I'd been so badly off I didn't know I was missing anything. She robbed me of any last defenses I might have had. The age difference didn't matter. If I looked to people like my tongue was hanging out even when my mouth was shut, then so be it. If I lost my dignity, my pride, my sense of self, then so be it. Four years on my own had taught me there are worse things to lose.

How long did she stand there, dancing? I don't know. Probably not long, not even a minute, and then she realized we were looking at her, rapt—because to some degree they all saw what I saw and felt what I felt. For that minute or however long it was, I don't think any of us used much oxygen.

She stepped off the Frisbee, laughing and blushing at the same time, confused but not really uncomfortable. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I just . . . I love that song.”

“All she wants to do is dance,” Rommie said.

“Yes, sometimes that's all she wants,” Mattie said, and blushed harder than ever. “Excuse me, I have to use the facility.” She tossed me the Frisbee and then dashed for the trailer.

I took a deep breath, trying to steady myself back to reality, and saw John doing the same thing. George Kennedy was wearing a mildly stunned expression, as if someone had fed him a light sedative and it was finally taking effect.

Thunder rumbled. This time it
did
sound closer.

I skimmed the Frisbee to Rommie. “What do you think?”

“I think I'm in love,” he said, and then seemed to give himself a small mental shake—it was a thing you could see in his eyes. “I also think it's time we got
going on those steaks if we're going to eat outside. Want to help me?”

“Sure.”

“I will, too,” John said.

We walked back to the trailer, leaving George and Kyra to play toss. Kyra was asking George if he had ever caught any crinimals. In the kitchen, Mattie was standing beside the open fridge and stacking steaks on a platter. “Thank God you guys came in. I was on the point of giving up and gobbling one of these just the way it is. They're the most beautiful things I ever saw.”

“You're the most beautiful thing
I
ever saw,” John said. He was being totally sincere, but the smile she gave him was distracted and a little bemused. I made a mental note to myself: never compliment a woman on her beauty when she has a couple of raw steaks in her hands. It just doesn't turn the windmill somehow.

“How are you at barbecuing meat?” she asked me. “Tell the truth, because these are way too good to mess up.”

“I can hold my own.”

“Okay, you're hired. John, you're assisting. Rommie, help me do salads.”

“My pleasure.”

George and Ki had come around to the front of the trailer and were now sitting in lawn-chairs like a couple of old cronies at their London club. George was telling Ki how he had shot it out with Rolfe Nedeau and the Real Bad Gang on Lisbon Street in 1993.

“George, what's happening to your
nose
?” John asked. “It's getting so
long.
”

“Do you mind?” George asked. “I'm having a conversation here.”

“Mr. Kennedy has caught lots of crooked crinimals,” Kyra said. “He caught the Real Bad Gang and put them in Supermax.”

“Yes,” I said. “Mr. Kennedy also won an Academy Award for acting in a movie called
Cool Hand Luke.
”

“That's absolutely correct,” George said. He raised his right hand and crossed the two fingers. “Me and Paul Newman. Just like that.”

“We have his pusgetti sauce,” Ki said gravely, and that got John laughing again. It didn't hit me the same way, but laughter is catching; just watching John was enough to break me up after a few seconds. We were howling like a couple of fools as we slapped the steaks on the grill. It's a wonder we didn't burn our hands off.

“Why are they laughing?” Ki asked George.

“Because they're foolish men with little tiny brains,” George said. “Now listen, Ki—I got them all except for the Human Headcase. He jumped into his car and I jumped into mine. The details of that chase are nothing for a little girl to hear—”

George regaled her with them anyway while John and I stood grinning at each other across Mattie's barbecue. “This is great, isn't it?” John said, and I nodded.

Mattie came out with corn wrapped in aluminum foil, followed by Rommie, who had a large salad bowl clasped in his arms and negotiated the steps carefully, trying to peer over the top of the bowl as he made his way down them.

We sat at the picnic table, George and Rommie on one side, John and I flanking Mattie on the other. Ki sat at the head, perched on a stack of old magazines in a
lawn-chair. Mattie tied a dishtowel around her neck, an indignity Ki submitted to only because (a) she was wearing new clothes, and (b) a dishtowel wasn't a baby-bib, at least technically speaking.

We ate hugely—salad, steak (and John was right, it really was the best I'd ever had), roasted corn on the cob, “strewberry snortcake” for dessert. By the time we'd gotten around to the snortcake, the thunderheads were noticeably closer and there was a hot, jerky breeze blowing around the yard.

“Mattie, if I never eat a meal as good as this one again, I won't be surprised,” Rommie said. “Thanks ever so much for having me.”

“Thank
you,
” she said. There were tears standing in her eyes. She took my hand on one side and John's on the other. She squeezed both. “Thank you all. If you knew what things were like for Ki and me before this last week . . .” She shook her head, gave John and me a final squeeze, and let go. “But that's over.”

“Look at the baby,” George said, amused.

Ki had slumped back in her lawn-chair and was looking at us with glazing eyes. Most of her hair had come out of the scrunchy and lay in clumps against her cheeks. There was a dab of whipped cream on her nose and a single yellow kernel of corn sitting in the middle of her chin.

“I threw the Frisbee six fousan times,” Kyra said. She spoke in a distant, declamatory tone. “I tired.”

Mattie started to get up. I put my hand on her arm. “Let me?”

She nodded, smiling. “If you want.”

I picked Kyra up and carried her around to the steps. Thunder rumbled again, a long, low roll that
sounded like the snarl of a huge dog. I looked up at the encroaching clouds, and as I did, movement caught my eye. It was an old blue car heading west on Wasp Hill Road toward the lake. The only reason I noticed it was that it was wearing one of those stupid bumper-stickers from the Village Cafe:
HORN BROKEN—WATCH FOR FINGER
.

I carried Ki up the steps and through the door, turning her so I wouldn't bump her head. “Take care of me,” she said in her sleep. There was a sadness in her voice that chilled me. It was as if she knew she was asking the impossible. “Take care of me, I'm little, Mama says I'm a little guy.”

“I'll take care of you,” I said, and kissed that silky place between her eyes again. “Don't worry, Ki, go to sleep.”

I carried her to her room and put her on her bed. By then she was totally conked out. I wiped the cream off her nose and picked the corn-kernel off her chin. I glanced at my watch and saw it was ten 'til two. They would be gathering at Grace Baptist by now. Bill Dean was wearing a gray tie. Buddy Jellison had a hat on. He was standing behind the church with some other men who were smoking before going inside.

I turned. Mattie was in the doorway. “Mike,” she said. “Come here, please.”

I went to her. There was no cloth between her waist and my hands this time. Her skin was warm, and as silky as her daughter's. She looked up at me, her lips parted. Her hips pressed forward, and when she felt what was hard down there, she pressed harder against it.

“Mike,” she said again.

I closed my eyes. I felt like someone who has just come to the doorway of a brightly lit room full of people laughing and talking. And dancing. Because sometimes that
is
all we want to do.

I want to come in,
I thought.
That's what
I
want to do, all I want to do. Let me do what I want. Let me—

I realized I was saying it aloud, whispering it rapidly into her ear as I held her with my hands going up and down her back, my fingertips ridging her spine, touching her shoulderblades, then coming around in front to cup her small breasts.

“Yes,” she said. “What we both want. Yes. That's fine.”

Slowly, she reached up with her thumbs and wiped the wet places from under my eyes. I drew back from her. “The key—”

She smiled a little. “You know where it is.”

“I'll come tonight.”

“Good.”

“I've been . . .” I had to clear my throat. I looked at Kyra, who was deeply asleep. “I've been lonely. I don't think I knew it, but I have been.”

“Me too. And I knew it for both of us. Kiss, please.”

I kissed her. I think our tongues touched, but I'm not sure. What I remember most clearly is the
liveness
of her. She was like a dreidel lightly spinning in my arms.

“Hey!” John called from outside, and we sprang apart. “You guys want to give us a little help? It's gonna rain!”

“Thanks for finally making up your mind,” she
said to me in a low voice. She turned and hurried back up the doublewide's narrow corridor. The next time she spoke to me, I don't think she knew who she was talking to, or where she was. The next time she spoke to me, she was dying.

*   *   *

“Don't wake the baby,” I heard her tell John, and his response: “Oh, sorry, sorry.”

I stood where I was a moment longer, getting my breath, then slipped into the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. I remember seeing a blue plastic whale in the bathtub as I turned to take a towel off the rack. I remember thinking that it probably blew bubbles out of its spout-hole, and I even remember having a momentary glimmer of an idea—a children's story about a spouting whale. Would you call him Willie? Nah, too obvious. Wilhelm, now—
that
had a fine round ring to it, simultaneously grand and amusing. Wilhelm the Spouting Whale.

I remember the bang of thunder from overhead. I remember how happy I was, with the decision finally made and the night to look forward to. I remember the murmur of men's voices and the murmur of Mattie's response as she told them where to put the stuff. Then I heard all of them going back out again.

I looked down at myself and saw a certain lump was subsiding. I remember thinking there was nothing so absurd-looking as a sexually excited man and knew I'd had this same thought before, perhaps in a dream. I left the bathroom, checked on Kyra again—rolled over on her side, fast asleep—and then went down the hall. I had just reached the living room when gunfire erupted outside. I never confused the
sound with thunder. There was a moment when my mind fumbled toward the idea of backfires—some kid's hotrod—and then I knew. Part of me had been expecting something to happen . . . but it had been expecting ghosts rather than gunfire. A fatal lapse.

It was the rapid
pah! pah! pah!
of an auto-fire weapon—a Glock nine-millimeter, as it turned out. Mattie screamed—a high, drilling scream that froze my blood. I heard John cry out in pain and George Kennedy bellow, “Down, down! For the love of Christ,
get her down!
”

Something hit the trailer like a hard spatter of hail—a rattle of punching sounds running from west to east. Something split the air in front of my eyes—I heard it. There was an almost-musical
sproing
sound, like a snapping guitar string. On the kitchen table, the salad bowl one of them had just brought in shattered.

I ran for the door and nearly dived down the cement-block steps. I saw the barbecue overturned, with the glowing coals already setting patches of the scant front-yard grass on fire. I saw Rommie Bissonette sitting with his legs outstretched, looking stupidly down at his ankle, which was soaked with blood. Mattie was on her hands and knees by the barbecue with her hair hanging in her face—it was as if she meant to sweep up the hot coals before they could cause some real trouble. John staggered toward me, holding out a hand. The arm above it was soaked with blood.

And I saw the car I'd seen before—the nondescript sedan with the joke sticker on it. It had gone up the road—the men inside making that first pass to check
us out—then turned around and come back. The shooter was still leaning out the front passenger window. I could see the stubby smoking weapon in his hands. It had a wire stock. His features were a blue blank broken only by huge gaping eyesockets—a ski-mask.