Circle of Three (35 page)

I went to the sink and ran water, squeezed Joy on my hands, rinsed. I yanked a paper towel off the holder, and over the sound of swishing paper I could hear Carrie’s urgent voice, high and full, direct, not careful, overlapping Jess Deeping’s baritone comfort. She didn’t talk to me like that, I didn’t know that tone. With me she held back. She protected herself.

The screen door slammed, and I hurried back into the living room. Empty. I pressed my face to the screen door. Jess Deeping drove a pickup truck. What else? You weren’t allowed to say “white trash” anymore, but you still knew it when you saw it, and that’s what that whole Deeping family had been, the cow farmer husband and his nutty wife and their slouching, long-haired boy. I’d detested them, Carrie was right about that. They came too close to the kind of people I’d been trying my whole adult life to get away from. I had, too.

The two of them stood by the curb next to the truck, oblivious to the misting rain. He had her hand, he was looking down at it while he talked, and she had her head up, looking full in his face. She came up to his cheekbone. He wasn’t a bad-looking man. He’d filled out since the days when he used to skulk around her like a starving crow, singed-looking somehow, wounded, always scrawny as a pitchfork. And always with that look in his eye like he wanted to snatch her up in his beak, his claws, and fly her off to his hiding place. That boy had never wanted anything but Carrie. I knew he was the enemy the minute I set eyes on him.

He leaned down and put his cheek on hers. They were saying good-bye. It looked like they’d kiss when they straightened
up, but they didn’t. He started around the back of his truck—and stopped when a little silver Honda pulled up behind it. George’s.

I told him to stay home, I said there was nothing for him to do, and here he was anyway. Was he my knight, or Carrie’s? It didn’t seem fair that she got two and I didn’t get any. He got out of the car like an old man, his tweed pants loose and ash strewn, his eyeglasses bumping against his chest on a chain. Carrie went and hugged him, but she didn’t get much back—his worried smile and some pats on the back, as if he were burping her. He kept his hand on her shoulder, though, while the three of them had a serious-looking conversation. To my knowledge George hadn’t seen Jess Deeping in twenty-five years, but if he thought anything was funny about him being at Carrie’s house, he didn’t show it.

I got tired of watching from afar. I punched open the screen door and marched out to join the party.

Carrie watched me come like I was Sherman bearing down on Atlanta. I saw her take a deep breath and lift her chin, girding herself. Lord, was I that formidable a character? If she only knew. That what I wouldn’t mind right now was somebody, preferably my husband, to fold me up in his arms and hold me tight and tell me everything was going to be just fine.

I stood next to George and interrupted him. “What’s going on?” He didn’t touch me, but I wasn’t surprised; I even saw it from his side for a change. You don’t hug a woman who
punches
and
marches
and
interrupts
. You move back, out of the way.

Jess Deeping bowed his head to me. “Mrs. Danziger,” he said in his low, sympathetic voice. You’d’ve sworn, if you were an outsider, that he didn’t despise me. He’d always been that way, I remembered, soft-spoken and respectful. He’d treated me, and George, too, with a funny kind of gentleness, in fact. It always put me on my guard.

“Hello,” I said, and I softened to him for a second, something
about his size, the way he stayed turned toward Carrie a few protective degrees. Then I thought of poor Ruth finding him and Carrie upstairs in her mama’s bed, and I froze up on him again. Predator, I thought. Ravenous crow.

“Mama, Jess and Pop are driving up to D.C. to look for Ruth.”

“What?”

“Jess was going by himself, but I said I’d go along with him.”

“I’ll be glad for the company.”

“We can take my car. Smaller.”

“That’ll be fine.”

They had it all figured out. I didn’t care for the way George said “Jess,” like he’d known him for ten years, like they were old fishing buddies. I thought of saying I’d go, too, just to make trouble. Things were moving too fast, all this action, everybody taking steps but me.

“You be careful driving, Pop,” Carrie said, walking Jess over to his side of the car. I saw her give him a quick, surreptitious kiss on the lips before he folded himself up and climbed in the passenger seat of the Honda. It made me smile in spite of myself. It made my heart sink.

“Got plenty of money? Got your gas credit card? Buckle up,” I told George, holding the door open while he settled himself and rooted his keys out of his pants pocket. “Watch out for the maniacs on that Beltway. They’ll kill you as soon as look at you.”

“We’ll be careful,” he said. “And we’ll call when we get there.”

“
And
if you find her,” I said.

“The D.C. cops know the license number,” Carrie said, leaning in the other window. “I don’t know how hard they’re looking, but they’ve got it. Oh, I’m so glad you’re going. Thank you, Pop.” She said something to Jess Deeping I couldn’t hear.

“Keep calling,” I said, backing up, “in case she shows up here. Which I fully expect her to do any minute.”

“Right-o.” George started up the car, took the brake off, waved, and crept away.

“Drives like a goddamn turtle,” I muttered, waving back. I wished I’d kissed him, though. On his whiskery old cheek. It wouldn’t have killed me. I wished I had.

Back to the house with the women. I liked the
idea
of the men going off to put things right, the women keeping the home fires burning. If it worked, it’d be a miracle. I couldn’t touch another cup of coffee, but Carrie poured one for herself and sat up straight to drink it. “I’m so glad you’re here. You and Pop. And Jess,” she added on purpose. “I don’t know what I’d do without you guys.”

“Them, maybe. I haven’t done a thing.”

“That’s not true—we know where Ruth is only because you got it out of Krystal.” She grinned. “What a terror you were, Mama. She never had a prayer.”

“Well, what a pinhead.”

“Oh, I’m still so angry! I’d like to brain her, I’d like to go over there and beat her up.”

“I’ll hold her arms.”

We leaned against each other for a minute. I got a thick feeling in the throat. I said, “I don’t want us to start up again.”

“I don’t either.”

“But I have something to say. I’m not taking any of the blame for your life.”

“No. No, and I don’t—”

“But you were right about one thing. I picked your father out on purpose. He’s a fine, fine man, but I married him because he was soft and dull, and that’s the truth.”

“Oh, Mama.”

“It’s okay, nothing’s going to change, we’ll never split up. What’s done is done. Anyway, I’m not interested in going out and finding Ricardo Montalban. I got exactly what I thought I wanted, and that’s the end of it.”

Carrie looked at me with glittery, worried eyes.

“It’s
okay
. I’m not hard up. I’ve got a good husband, a wonderful daughter, and a perfect grandchild. Usually perfect.
I made my bed fifty years ago, and I swear to God this is the last time you’ll ever hear me complain about it.”

She laid the length of her forearm against mine. “What about Jess?”

“What about him? What kind of a name is that, anyway,
Jess
?” Never mind Deeping. “Is it Jesse or isn’t it? What the heck is his name?”

“Jesse Holmes Deeping. Holmes was his mother’s maiden name.”

“Holmes. That’s not too bad.”

“Oh, Mama, he’ll be so pleased.”

I ignored that. “If you choose him…”

“What?”

“I always thought if you ended up with that boy…”

“What, Mama?”

“I thought it would mean I’d chosen wrong, all those years ago. I thought it would mean my whole life, everything I picked…Well, anyway. I think that’s how my thinking went.” Carrie’s face got pink. She put her head down, but I saw a teardrop hit her on the arm. I put my hand on her back and rubbed her softly between her shoulders. “What kills me is having to admit that Mr. Jesse Holmes Deeping turned out to be a goddamn pillar of the community. For what that’s worth.”

“He makes me happy.”

“I noticed. I guess that can’t be all bad.”

Carrie gave a wet laugh.

“So let’s finish this up. You’re not me and I’m not you, and here you’ve got a second chance to pick somebody who might be good for you. So do whatever you want, because you’re not me.”

“I know I’m not you.”

“I’m saying that for my benefit.”

“Oh.” She looked at me like she’d never seen me before.

“Meanwhile, don’t think I’m done with George. Not by a long shot. I’ve got plans for that guy.”

“What will you do?”

“Torture him. Make him take dance lessons, that’s number one. We’ve got a vacation coming up—could be a second honeymoon.” Carrie smiled, not looking at me—I’d gone too far with that one. “Maybe I’ll take him to Krystal’s,” I said. “She owes us one. I’m thinking a deal on aroma-therapy. Or better yet, a high colonic.”

Carrie heaved a great sigh. “You love him, though, don’t you?”

A picture of the narrow, dwindling future opened for a second in my mind’s eye. “Of course I do,” I said, and pushed it out of sight. I felt Carrie relax against me. “’Course I do. And vice versa. In his way.” We were both quiet, and I imagined she was thinking that last over, sizing it up against appearances. Weighing it against the evidence. It was true as far as it went.

Now that is a stingy, miserly phrase.
True as far as it went
. I lived seventy years like that, in most ways. I kept it small and quiet, as if there was somebody I was afraid of whose attention I didn’t want to attract. But I wasn’t meant to be that way—I should’ve been bigger and louder. When it came down to it, I didn’t fit my own life.

“Hey,” I said after a while. “How’re you holding up?”

“I’m better. I don’t know why. I guess because they went up there. Jess and Pop.”

“Somebody’s doing something.”

“I don’t feel so crazy.”

“They might find her,” I said.

“They might.”

“I just hope it’s them and not the cops.”

“Me, too.”

Carrie leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “I love you, Mama.”

“I love you, too.”

She folded her arms on the table and put her head down, closed her eyes. She fell asleep almost instantly, while I sat still as a statue and hardly breathed. I was sorry when she jolted awake after only about five minutes.

Go on upstairs and take a nap, I told her, I’ll answer the phone if it rings. No, she wouldn’t. So we moved around the house together all day, dragging from room to room for a change of scene. The humidity had to be 100 percent. Nothing to see from the windows but gray and rain. George called in the afternoon to say they were in Georgetown, starting their search. After that the police called twice—nothing to report. About six o’clock, Carrie was standing at the screen door staring out at the rain when the phone rang again. I answered.

“Hello,” George’s mild, uncertain voice said. “That you, Dana? Carrie there?”

Carrie hurried over, hissed, “
Who is it
?”

“It’s your father. George, what’s going on?”

“Well, no luck so far, I’m very sorry to report.”

Carrie was poised over me like a cat, eyes wide, every muscle tense. I shook my head, and she went limp. She slumped beside me on the sofa, leaning on me, pressing her ear to the phone.

“We’ve been driving around, walking around,” George went on. “I think we’ve been in every store in Georgetown.”

“What about tattoo parlors? That’s where she was going—did you go to all the tattoo places?”

“Oh, yes, we did that first thing, and that was somewhat fruitful, actually, although disturbing as well.”

“How do you mean?” I said. Carrie had a death grip on my wrist; I was losing circulation in my hand.

“Well, we talked to a fellow in one place, quite a colorful shop, who remembered a girl who did look a bit like Ruth. At least she seemed to when he described her.”

“And?”

“He wouldn’t give her a tattoo because she was too young. She had no proof of age, so he sent her on her way.”

“And? So?”

“Well, the worrisome thing is, this fellow in the store says when the girl left—and of course she might not have been Ruth—when she left, he thinks perhaps one of his male customers
may have followed her. Gone out after her, in any case. It’s probably nothing—I just didn’t like the sound of it. Don’t tell Carrie about this, will you? That might be best.”

Too late. She was already curled up in a ball on the sofa with her hands over her ears.

I
DROVE BY
Rude Boy’s Industrial Tattoos and Piercings four times, and never saw creepy guy’s gray car. It was getting dark, though, so every car was starting to look gray. But I didn’t think he was there. He thought I’d bolted on him. If he was looking for me at all, which he probably wasn’t, he was looking in Anacostia or Southeast, not the very place on Georgia Avenue he’d suggested we should go to together. No, I’d pulled a double-blind on him or whatever you call it. I foiled him.

No way would I have ever gotten into creepy guy’s car. What was I, crazy? I wouldn’t have gotten in any strange man’s car, but especially that guy’s. First of all, there was something icky about his body. I hated his stomach, the way the tight round curve of it poked out at me, and the long line of his fly. He was probably harmless—people don’t get kidnapped in the middle of Georgetown on a Sunday afternoon, not that I ever heard of. But still, something about that guy’s shape scared me. Something about his stomach.

On the fifth pass, I spotted a parking place two doors down from Rude Boy’s, in front of a boarded-up wig shop. Too bad I couldn’t parallel park. I almost always ended up like two yards away from the curb and had to start over, which I preferred not to do with cars backed up and people
gawking at me. Especially today, when I was trying to keep a low profile.

It was kind of a scary neighborhood. Georgia Avenue started out okay, but it got rougher and rougher the farther up you went, and this was the roughest part, these blocks around Rude Boy’s. People who looked like drug dealers were hanging out in doorways and on the corners, and I saw two women who might be prostitutes. One, who was black but had platinum blonde hair, wore clear plastic boots with high heels and a leopard skin skirt and a purple tank top. Then again, she could be an entertainer, a singer or something in one of the rundown clubs around here. Maybe she sang the blues. Maybe she was just starting out, like Diana Ross in that movie. Probably not, though. She really looked like a prostitute.

Behind Georgia Avenue was a bumpy, smelly alley with parking areas in back of all the stores. Faded signs that looked like they’d been shot said
CUSTOMER PARKING ONLY, BINGO’S ARMY SURPLUS
, and
RAY’S LIQUORS ONLY, TOWING ENFORCED
. All the spaces behind Ray’s Liquors were taken, although it was Sunday. Rude Boy’s lot was filled, too. I found a tiny, possibly illegal crevice by the garbage Dumpter behind Gloria’s Wigs and Beauty, which apparently didn’t exist anymore, if being boarded-up meant anything, and it only took five minutes to wedge the Chevy into it. It took almost that long for the engine to die after I turned the key off. So embarrassing. Nothing like chronic bronchitis to make your car stand out in a crowd.

Okay. Moment of truth. If I got a tattoo, which Mom was against and had semiforbidden until I was eighteen, it would be to pay her back. Might as well be clear about that. When you looked at it like that, it seemed kind of immature.

So? I’d never felt like this before. This was a little taste of what it was going to be like to be a grown-up. Before, I’d been able to imagine myself being, say, twenty-one or twenty-five, but that was about it; after that it got hazy and
not interesting. But now, because of Mom and Jess, my imaginable age had been jacked up to, like, thirty. This was a totally adult deal, and it made me sick, it made me want to throw up. There used to be an order to things, but it got broken, my life cracked. This was the adult part—I had a very strong feeling that I’d crossed over a line and entered a new phase of myself. It turned out the older you got, the less things made sense. And this was what we were all in such a hurry to get to, me and Jamie and Raven and Caitlin and everybody in my whole school! What a crock! It was like that movie where the guy in the cult has this horrible, grotesque near-death experience and he comes back to tell his friends in the cult not to do it, don’t commit suicide, there’s no white light, it’s all bullshit—but they don’t believe him and they kill themselves and it’s this big disgusting bloodbath and that’s the end.

I had to get out of the car on the passenger side because the driver’s door was mashed up too close to the Dumpster. Rap music thumped from somewhere—a car, because now it was fading. Clayborne was humid, but this was ridiculous; this air felt muggy and smelled dirty, full of exhaust and garbage and sweat and no trees. At least it wasn’t raining right now. I only had three blocks to walk around to Rude Boy’s, but two different guys spoke to me, “Hey, baby, how you doin’?” said one, and the other made kissing noises. I tried to ignore them without looking mean. It worked, because neither of them followed me.

Rude Boy’s was freezing cold. It felt great, I could feel the perspiration on my skin drying. A bell above the door rang when I opened it, but I stood in the middle of the bright, empty front room for a whole minute and nobody came. No
WE I.D.
signs, I noticed; only ones that said
NO CHECKS, NO CREDIT
, and
TIPPING IS ENCOURAGED
. I could smell chemicals, alcohol and something else, like airplane glue. Well, that was good, maybe, it probably meant they kept the place really clean. It gave me a queasy feeling,
though, like being at the doctor’s. So did a sound coming from the open door in the back, a sound like the drill at the dentist’s office. Tattoo gun.

My stomach turned over. I could still leave, nobody had even seen me yet.

Screw that. I walked over to the right-hand wall, which was covered from top to bottom with pictures of tattoos. Most of them you could rule out right away, naked ladies, skeletons, devils, motorcycles on fire, grim reapers, snakes, sharks, scorpions, worms, Confederate flags. I wasn’t that wild about the girly stuff either, the dream catchers and butterflies and pretty hearts and rosebuds. There must be something here that expressed my inner self. Also something I could afford—Rude Boy had helpfully put the prices next to the tattoos. Marvin the Martian cost seventy-five dollars and took fifty minutes. Demon Skull was twice as much, but you could see why, all that detail in the creepy hollowed-out eyes and the evil grin. I was down to about eighty bucks since parking in Georgetown and filling the Chevy with gas.

A man came through the door in back. He stopped and looked at me but didn’t say anything.

“Hi,” I said.

He nodded. I guessed he was black because of his hair, which was in thick charcoal dreadlocks caught up in a huge woolen cap, but he was very light-skinned and his eyes were silvery blue, not brown. He was about my height but very slender, with a long, thin, braided goatee tied at the bottom with beads.

He didn’t say anything, so I couldn’t be sure he worked here. “Lotta tattoos,” I said, waving at the walls.

He said, “Yeah,” very softly, with a sleepy smile. Maybe he was high on ganja.

“I have seventy dollars,” I lied. “I was looking for some flash.”

He nodded.

“So. That would be…”

He lifted his right arm and did a slow, dreamy pivot, indicating the artwork all around us.

“Oh. So—any of these?”

“Mmm. You’re eighteen?”

“Oh, yes. Just today. It’s my birthday.” Stop talking. “A present to myself, I was thinking. Happy birthday to me.”

He didn’t say anything, but he smiled. And I knew I was in.

Okay. Okay! Now, what to pick? It was really hard to concentrate with the guy watching me. “I guess something simple. And cheap,” I added with a laugh, but he didn’t laugh back and he didn’t suggest anything, didn’t wave me over to the simple but cheap section. He just stood and looked at me. Weird. It made me nervous.

I spotted some plain black designs, crucifixes, the man symbol, an ankh. An ankh? Raven wore one around his neck. It was the Egyptian emblem of life. It was certainly simple, and the one in this drawing only cost fifty-five dollars. Life—I believed in life. I was
for
life, very much so. It summed up one of my primary inner beliefs, no question. True, it was kind of a basic belief; not too many people were
against
life. Ha-ha. No, but think of all the people who got skull or coffin or corpse tattoos—they were antilife, or pretending to be. If you looked at it like that, the ankh was a strong positive statement. I would be setting myself apart from the morbid antilifers, the posers who thought it was cool to be macabre and grisly and negative. And this was only my first tattoo, I’d probably get more later on, the ankh was like the foundation symbol the rest would build on. First life, then…whatever.

“This one,” I said, pointing.

The man drifted over. “No. This?” He sounded like he didn’t believe me. His eyes were beautiful when he opened them wide. He looked at me with a new kind of interest, as if this was the last tattoo in the world he thought I’d pick. Doubts and second thoughts hit me. Not this one? This was uncool?

“Okay,” he said lightly. “I can fill it in with a color for seventy dollars.”

“With a color?”

“One color. If you like.” He had an accent; I could hear it now that he was speaking more than one word at a time. His voice was very musical.

“Umm…red?”

He shrugged.

“I want it to really show up.”

“Where do you want it?” he asked after a long pause.

This I’d given a lot of thought to. I wanted it highly visible, I wanted it
in your face
. So not my ankle or my boob or my shoulder blade, none of those coy places, even my arm would be covered up with clothes most of the time. “Here, I want it right here.” I held up the top of my right hand and ran my finger along the joint. “Half on my hand and half on my wrist, like overlapping. Right next to the bone. And as big as you can make it.”

He thought about that for a while before nodding slowly. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

My stomach did another flip. I was doing it! I was following him through the door in back and moving down a corridor past rooms hidden by plastic shower curtains, and the voices and rap music and the humming tattoo machines that had been barely audible in the outer room were loud and busy-sounding and thrilling—this place was jumping! Other people were behind the curtains getting tattooed right now, which was a relief, it made me feel great, more excited and not as scared. The man stopped at the last door on the right, before the fire exit door in the very back, and stood aside so I could go in first, holding the tattered blue plastic shower curtain back for me. “Thank you,” I said, and went in.

It was just a room. I was kind of disappointed. “Have a seat,” he said, and I sat down in one of the two regular chairs, just plain wooden chairs. I didn’t know what I’d expected—maybe like a barbershop chair, a dentist’s chair, something that reclined. I looked around, but there wasn’t
much to see, drawings tacked on the walls of pretty gaudy tattoos, apparently this guy’s custom creations. Oh—his name was Julian; I knew because he’d signed some of the tattoos.

He had his back to me, he was doing something at a table in the corner. He wore baggy corduroys and a bulky, no-color sweater, through which I could see his shoulder blades and his hips and the bony curve of his butt. He seemed very nice. I imagined him inviting me to go home with him after he did the tattoo. He’d live right over the shop. He would make me spicy food, curried rice or something, and serve it to me on his lumpy couch. Afterward, we’d become lovers, and it would be earthy and real because he was foreign and older. I’d learn a great deal from him. We would live over the store and take care of each other until it was time for me to move on. Which would be very sad and very sweet, but inevitable.

He turned around, holding a bottle of alcohol and some cotton swabs. All of a sudden I was freezing; no wonder he wore a sweater, it was probably fifty degrees in here. He pulled up the other chair close to mine and lifted my right hand out of my lap. He started cleaning it with the alcohol and swabs, and I stared at the crown of his head, how the hair grew in neat lines, thick and woolly, out of his clean scalp. When we lived together I’d braid it for him. I’d stand behind him while he sat in a kitchen chair with a cat in his lap, sipping the herbal tea I’d made him.

After he cleaned my hand once, he cleaned it all over again, really scrubbed it, and then he sprayed it with something from a can, probably an antiseptic. So that was good, this was a clean place. I thought of what the guy at Karma Chameleon had said about needles, but I didn’t know exactly what to say to Julian, how to ask.
Oh, by the way, are your needles clean?
How rude. Anyway, I trusted him, I’d already decided.

He went back over to the table. I wished he would talk to me, try to set me at ease, like Dr. Lane did before he filled my teeth. There was the tattoo gun, I could see it, shiny silver
and smaller than I’d expected. Julian was doing something with little wells, putting ink in them, red and black. I turned away, I couldn’t look.

Oh,
God
. I couldn’t even stand getting a shot, and this was going to be like a million shots. What if I fainted? I wasn’t that great with pain.
Chill
, I told myself, people do this all the time. It’s like sex, you can’t believe so many people could have it, but look at the evidence, the world has six billion people or something so somebody must be doing it. Same with tattoos, look at all those basketball players, look at Dennis Rodman, look at Madonna, look at the Red Hot Chili Peppers. They weren’t babies and neither was I, I could do it if they could, and anyway Raven said it was more like vibration than a pain, he said it was practically nothing, you got used to it and then it was almost pleasant, it was like a drug high or—

“I’ll start.” Julian wheeled over a little padded platform and put my forearm on top of it. He looked up when he saw my hand trembling. “Are you afraid?”

I tried to smile, but my lips were too stiff. “No. Not really. Does it hurt?” I gave a high, childish laugh, and blushed. I could have bolted then, jumped up, grabbed my purse, and run. I had a feeling I might throw up. I was so scared, my whole body was shaking with every heartbeat.