Dance for the Dead (31 page)

“Get what?”

“The medical records.”

“Oh. Sure.” She
looked uncomfortable. “They got burned up.”

“Good.” Jane went
back to her sorting. “It’s one more avenue Barraclough
had that he doesn’t have anymore.”

Mary’s voice began in a
quiet tone that was low-pitched and tense, as though she were flexing
her throat muscles to keep her vocal cords from tightening. “They
started the fire while I was asleep in the house, you know. They
didn’t do it so nobody would know they had been there. They
made me come out to them because they were dressed like firemen who
were there to save me. I couldn’t see their faces, just the
masks and helmets and raincoats.”

“I know,” said Jane.

“I’m not trying to
tell you what happened,” said Mary Perkins. “I’m
trying to tell you what happened to me.” She said more softly,
“To me.” She stared at Jane’s face for a reaction,
and what she saw told her Jane was waiting. “I’m new at
this,” she said again. “For you it’s like herding
cattle around. It’s not just taking care of them; it’s
making sure they don’t stampede off a cliff or eat poison or
drink so much water that their stomachs rupture.”

“There’s nothing to
be ashamed of,” said Jane. “They had you. It wasn’t
something you imagined.”

“They do that too. They
talk softly to the cattle and say, ‘Come on, girl. It’s
okay.’ But it’s not exactly true and it’s not
exactly for the cow’s benefit.” Mary took a deep breath.
“I’m not used to being the only one who doesn’t
know things, and I’m not used to this way of looking at the
world. I guess I should have had enough imagination to figure out
what it was like. I once knew some people slightly who were supposed
to be very tough, but I never saw any of them actually
do
anything. I keep looking back and wondering how I ever got from
being eighteen and smart and pretty all the way to being twice that
and having men I never saw before burning me out of a house.”

Jane shrugged. “You told
me how it happened.”

“No,” said Mary
Perkins. “No, I didn’t. I told you what happened to some
savings and loan companies. Not what happened to me.”

Jane stopped sorting and began
to string together credit cards and licenses with strips of adhesive
tape. She did not dare look at Mary for fear there would be something
in her eyes that gave Mary permission to stop talking.

“In the summer of 1981 I
was twenty-two. I had just graduated from Florida State. I was good
at interviews – I could tell that they liked me – but I
couldn’t seem to get a job. I remember coming home and closing
the door to my bedroom upstairs. I would take off my outfit and hang
it up carefully so my makeup wouldn’t ruin it when I flopped
down on the bed to cry. Then I would get newspapers from other places
and write letters to answer the ads. Finally in October I got a job.
Winton-Waugh Savings in Waco, Texas, wanted a management trainee. I
went to work in the loan department at just about the time when
things started heating up. I remember I was making two hundred and
seventy-two dollars a week. Pretty soon I started noticing that a lot
more money was coming into the bank, and a lot more going out as
loans. That was the start.”

“What did you do?”

“I went to a party.”
Her face had an ironic smile, as though she had thought about it so
many times that she expected Jane to understand. “The bank had
a giant bash for its big customers, and I got introduced to some of
them. There were men there who had tens of millions of dollars. And I
was with them, talking futures and options with them as if I was one
of them. There was one in particular who was really nice. His name
was Dan Campbell. Not Daniel. When he signed papers he wrote ‘Dan.’
He had everything: a big house in Houston, a cattle ranch in
Oklahoma, and a plane for flying back and forth. I knew all about
them because the loan papers were in a filing cabinet right behind
the desk where I sat every day.”

“There was this big
candlelight dinner on tables set up in the bank lobby, and dancing.
I’d never seen so much liquor, all the bottles lined up on this
portable bar with the lights behind them so they looked pretty, like
perfume bottles or something. When the formal party was over and most
of the people went home, the night wasn’t over. There was a
small private party just for maybe twenty people like Dan Campbell in
the executive suites down the hall. We all started in Mr. Waugh’s
office, but people wandered out into the garden outside the sliding
door and into some of the other offices, carrying their drinks.
Somehow Dan Campbell and I ended up in my office. After a few minutes
he switched off the light and locked the door. A person would have
had to be retarded not to have it occur to her that if we didn’t
make any noise people would never know we were in there.”

“You don’t have to
tell me this.”

“Yes, I do,” said
Mary. Her face was set and insistent. “So then Dan Campbell is
saying, ‘Come on, Lily. Just touch it. I promise it won’t
bite.’ I was not an innocent young thing. I don’t want to
give you that impression or imply that I was drunk or something. I
wasn’t left breathless and swept off my feet by a charming
older man. If I was dazzled by anything, it was by being near all
that money. Also, I liked him and was impressed with him, so I did
it.”

“The next day I was back
at my desk as usual, feeling a little bit amazed when my eyes would
happen to fall on some particular piece of furniture, and then a
little depressed and foolish, and in comes a delivery guy with
twenty-four long-stemmed red roses in a beautiful crystal vase and
puts them on my desk. I see them, and for a second I think maybe I
wasn’t just this stupid girl who got talked into something.
Maybe this was just what I had convinced myself it was for a few
minutes last night when I forgot it was the bank that took me to
dinner. Then I opened the card, and it was signed by Mr. Waugh, my
boss. There was a check for a thousand dollars from the bank that
said ‘Employee Incentive Bonus.’”

“Did you quit?”

“No,” said Mary. “I
didn’t. I started to, I thought about it, but I didn’t do
it. You hear a lot about people doing that, but you don’t see
it much. People say they walked out, threw their jobs away or
something, but at least they have their principles. But it’s
almost never like that. It almost never happens right away, just like
you never think of the clever thing to say to somebody when it would
have mattered. And I couldn’t think of a way to tell Mr. Waugh
I resented getting a check for it without coming out and announcing
exactly what it was that he and I both knew I had done. I decided I
wasn’t about to face that conversation, and there was nothing
else I could do to change things. All I could do was cash the check
and go on with my life.”

“The bank was growing
then, and pretty soon I’m not working in the loan department,
I’m a loan officer. Mr. Waugh tells me we’ve got to go on
a business trip to Houston. I remember the flowers and get all upset,
but there just isn’t a way to get out of it. By now I
understand why the bank needs to move money in and out, and my job is
to keep the money going out, and that means meeting with customers.
And there were two other women going: Mr. Waugh’s assistant and
another loan officer.

The pay was getting better and
better, and I was learning a lot, so I didn’t try to get out of
it.”

Jane could tell that Mary was
not lying now. She was trying to push away the excuses. This was a
confession.

“We meet with a group of
twelve investors who have formed a limited partnership for a real
estate development. You know, right now I can’t even remember
what they were calling it, but it was the usual thing, something like
Sunnydale Vistas or Meadowgrove Heights. Anyway, the first session is
in an office they’ve set up near River Oaks. Not
in
River
Oaks, of course, but close enough so people would smell money on
their business cards. Things were really tantalizing in that first
session. We’ve got the chance to lend them sixty million, maybe
more later. They’re willing to keep it deposited until they
need it, with the interest in escrow offsetting our costs –
which are nil – and release times tied to what gets built. Then
we were supposed to go out and see the land. It was near La Porte,
right by Galveston Bay. The plans called for canals, with boat slips
for each house, malls, and all that.”

“We don’t drive,
though. We go out to get the best view on this big boat that’s
leased to the company’s sales department for impressing the
customers. We see it through binoculars and talk business until dark,
but still no papers get signed. We have a catered dinner, and still
no agreement comes out of Mr. Waugh’s briefcase. It just
degenerates into a cocktail party on the upper deck. Everybody’s
talking about money and their favorite things that it buys and how
great they’re all doing. They’re getting tipsy and
optimistic. Pretty soon I start to hear music coming from somewhere
down below, and laughing and loud talk. One by one, people start to
disappear. It goes on awhile until it’s just me and Waugh and
maybe three of these investors. It’s getting cold up on deck. I
say to Waugh, ‘Maybe I’ll go down below.’ He says,
‘If you like.’ So I make my way down those steps in the
dark in high heels carrying a martini.”

“The others didn’t
go down?”

“One did. I had to help
him, because he was getting drunk. So I go down and open the door to
this big room they called the saloon, and the music is deafening.
What I see at that moment makes me drop my drink. It’s Waugh’s
assistant. Her name was Maria. She’s dancing, doing a strip for
these four investors, and I do not mean a tease. When I came in she
was already down to her panties, and she’s got her thumbs in
the waistband, as though they were about to move south. I start to
back out, but the drunk behind me pushes me in, and Maria sees me.
She kind of wriggles over to me without losing a beat, puts her arm
around me with a big smile, yells into my ear, ‘Come on. Get
with the party,’ and starts pulling me into the saloon with
her. I pushed her arm off me and said, ‘Stop it. I’m not
some hooker.’”

“What happened?”

“She got really angry –
shot me a look that would knock a pigeon off a telephone wire –
and said, ‘Don’t kid me, honey. Who do you think made out
your last bonus check?’ But then there’s one of these
investors behind her, and he’s impatient for the show to go on,
and he pulls the panties down to her feet. She grins, steps out of
them, kind of sticks out her rear end, gives it a little wriggle, and
starts to dance with him. I turn and walk out of the saloon. I don’t
know where to go. I open the door to one of the staterooms, and
there’s the other loan officer. She’s doing one of the
investors on the bed while a couple of others watch. I shut the door,
go back up the hallway toward the steps, and there’s Mr. Waugh.
He opens the door of the saloon so he can glance in, and I can see
that Maria has gone way beyond the strip. It’s an orgy. He
opens the door a little wider, holding it for me to go in first. Then
he sees the expression on my face, kind of shrugs, and goes inside. I
spend the next four hours alone up on that freezing deck.”

“Did he fire you?”

“No. I took a plane back
by myself and came in Monday morning to find the loan papers, all
signed, on my desk. All of a sudden the account was mine and I had to
make the deal work – get it through the loan committee and the
lawyers, and set up the schedules, and all that. And I had to make
out the bonus checks: ten grand each. Nobody said a word about it.
Maria was invisible for weeks. The other loan officer – her
name was Kathy – was no friend of mine. She never spoke to me
again. I started looking for jobs. The bank was growing out of
control by then, so we were all busy enough not to have to look right
at each other.”

“Nothing else happened?”

“About a month later, I
come into work and there are these strange women in the office. Both
of them are young – twenty or twenty-one – and gorgeous.
Maria comes in with them, and her face is absolutely empty. She says
to me, ‘We’re really running short of space around here.
Mr. Waugh wants you to move back out to your old desk to make room
for the new loan officers.’ Out front was the pool of low-level
clerical people and beginners. I cleaned out my office –
pictures, plants, and paper clips – carried everything out, and
put it all on my old desk, and something happened. I knew they wanted
me to quit, and I wanted to quit, but up until then I had also wanted
to outlast them, take whatever they had to offer for as long as it
took and then end up with a better job somewhere else. I had been
operating on the theory that I made them more uncomfortable than they
made me. But it was too much. I closed the desk drawer and walked
into Mr. Waugh’s office. He was on the phone and he said into
it, ‘Excuse me. I have something I have to take care of. I’ll
call you right back,’ all the time with his eyes on me. He hung
up. I said, ‘You didn’t have to hang up. I just wanted to
say goodbye.’ I reached over the desk and shook his hand and
said, ‘Thank you for hiring me.’ He was surprised. I
thought at first that he was just relieved because it wasn’t a
horrible scene, but before I was across the lobby I realized that all
along he had been expecting me to come around.”

“You didn’t have
another job. Where did you go?”

Mary Perkins gave a sad little
laugh. “I went nowhere. I couldn’t find another job in
town. I couldn’t find one anywhere, so I moved to California.
Just getting there took about the last of the money I had saved. I
was out of work for six months. I was twenty-four, looking better
than I ever have in my life because I didn’t have enough money
to eat regularly. I’m not trying to make you feel sorry for me.
The fantasy I had wasn’t about getting a nicer place to live
and having enough food. It was getting rich – really rich. I
had been on the party boats, done the big real estate deals, and
flown in the private planes, and I wanted them again. So I thought of
how to get them, and I got started.”