Little Blue Lies (3 page)

Maxine seems utterly unconcerned, which should relax me some but relaxes me none.

“She is on vacation, just like I said.”

“Where on vacation? Who with?”

“Listen,” Ronny says, standing up. The way a guy stands up. You need to take notice when a guy stands up that way, especially a guy like Ronny. “I have to politely point out that you are out of line. That, lest you forget, my daughter dumped you and she has a life of her own and it is none of your damn business where she goes or who she goes with. I have to politely point out that you are entitled to none of the information you are demanding, but I will tell you she left here a short while ago in the company of a man, and I point this out only because it pleases me to do so. And now I will politely point you in the direction of the exit.”

“Polite my ass,” Maxine says, shoving her father back down onto his seat and walking around to my side of the bar. She takes me by the arm as we walk to the door.

“Sorry about that, O,” she says. “You know how he is. If I get anything more out of him, I'll let you know.”

“Thanks, Maxie,” I say.

When we get to the door, Leona appears, standing in the doorway that leads to the living room. She looks haunted, fragile.

“Where is she, Ma?” Maxine says flatly. “I bet you do
know. Wouldja just say, so he can not worry a little bit?”

It would not be correct to call the noise from the kitchen a bark. If a bear put its voice into a bark, it would sound like this.

“LeOna!” Ronny calls.

Leona raises her hand to cover her mouth and nose. Her sigh hisses through the grille of her fingers before she turns and walks back into the living room.

•  •  •

“What is wrong with you?” Mom says when I've made my third lap of the house. I pace. When I'm trying to think or to unthink, I pace, which makes the machinery of my mind far too visible to the people who know me well.

“Nothing,” I say, passing her right by.

She is sitting at the dining room table, sketching. She has her own study, where most of her contracted commercial design crap gets done, but when she's in itch-a-sketch mode looking for inspiration, she plunks down wherever the plunkin's good.

“Your sweat stains say otherwise,” she says.

It takes about twenty seconds at this pace for me to make the circuit—living room, hallway, dining room, kitchen, hallway, living room again—which gives us both good time to compose snappy retorts for each other by the time I pass through her space once more.

“Sweat doesn't speak,” I say.

“Neither do you, and that's not healthy. What's wrong?”

“Are you sketching me?”

“Of course I am.”

“Cut it out. You know I hate it.”

“I'll stop if you stop.”

She has a giant portfolio of her me-as-salesman portraits. I look like my father, I suppose, only less successful.

“Want to see?” she says as I sit across the table from her.

I nod weakly.

Okay, this one is different. She has drawn me the way cartoonists draw two characters chasing each other around a tree—just a blur of circular lines with what looks like my nose and furrowed brow emerging somewhere in the middle of it.

“That's instantly my favorite,” I say.

She looks far more pleased than this kind of statement should make a person. I have to remember how much she cares what I think, what I say. I have not always used my powers wisely there.

“I'm going to frame it,” she says, signing the corner carefully. “You going to talk?”

I think about it. I decide I am. Sort of.

“There's nothing to say,” I say. “I'm just a little concerned about Junie. But it's probably nothing.”

She turns the page in her big sketchbook and starts with
the telltale scratchy-sounding strokes and furtive glances that mean I'm sketch material again.

“Jesus, Mom . . .”

“Shush. Stay still. I mean, don't shush. But do stay still.”

“Fine. Well, we're not together anymore, so it's really none of my business. . . .”

“You are going to have to move on somehow, unfortunately. It's going to take some time, and some pain.”

“I know. But it's not just that . . .”

“Speaking of Junie, did you hear that that awful man over there, that One Who Knows character, won the lottery? Again?”

“What?”

“Yes. Rumor has it that he's
won
the lottery.
Again
.” My mother hates the way people do air quotation marks with their fingers, and she is constantly at war with what she considers to be the corroding effects of all things cliché, so at times like this, when she says words like those—“won” and “again”—to register her scorn she puts them in italics by placing her hands karate chop fashion alongside her face at 45 degree angles and chopping the air. That she also goes bug-eyed and lurches forward when she does it is, I believe, involuntary.

“Where did you hear that
rumor
?” I say, chopping crazed italics in the air.

“Your father brought it home from the office, naturally.”
If there is a financial transaction, legitimate or otherwise, that happens in this state at ten in the morning, those guys are discussing it over lunch.

He's not a bad guy, my father. But if water were money, he'd be a fish.

And as for money folk, they don't come any fishier than One Who Knows. He may not have actually won the lottery that time a few years back, but he certainly collected it. Very publicly too, so everyone could see. See, it is commonly known in that neighborhood that anyone in the area who wins the lottery in any meaningful way should come to Juan with the ticket. I was never clear about what the deal on offer was, but I got the impression it involved the winner being paid a generous chunk of the cover price of that windfall, tax free, combined with a job for life and all the fringe benefits implied by joining the select company of Juan's nearest and dearest.

And if the famously work-shy Juan was able to show everybody, especially his ninety-seven-year-old mom and his neighbors and the Internal Revenue Service his great honest good fortune on the evening news, well, a feel-good story all over it surely was.

A sweet deal, some might say, and one reason the man so famously splashes out on tickets for almost everybody he meets. If you couldn't really tell which tickets you bought on your own and which were the result of the large largesse of
the man himself, well, then maybe all tickets were his tickets. He spikes the punch, it's his buzz as much as yours.

He tended to see it that way anyway.

“Good for him,” I say. “Such a lucky, lucky guy, huh?”

“Indeed. Hey, maybe he would like to have his portrait done to commemorate the fortuitous moment. I could do that thing they do, the Roman emperor approach, where I do him from the shoulders up, robe hanging off him, hair all slicked down and ringed with a laurel wreath?”

I picture it and I laugh, and some of the tension I felt earlier washes away as I watch the crinkly lines at the corners of my mother's eyes deepen. She is happy, grinning away and scribbling, and this is something we can enjoy, do enjoy, having fun at somebody's minor expense. But somebody who invites it, of course.

“Hey,” I suddenly say. “You're doing it to
me
right now, aren't you?”

She giggles and scribbles.

“Fine,” I sigh. “Show me.”

Yup indeed. It's toga-party me, laurel leaves and all, and she has even gone to the trouble of giving me those Roman bangs that make it look like I cut my own hair. And I
still
look like I'm selling something.

“Can I have it?” I ask.

She is beaming, like a kid.

“It's not that big a deal, Mom. I wish you wouldn't be like this. It puts a lot of pressure on me.”

She is signing the portrait with a flourish. “And God knows you don't need any more of that, Mr. Pace Car. You're pretty torqued up already.”

“Yeah. It's just . . . Yeah, sorry. I'll be all right.”

She hands me over the sketch and then goes all weird coy on me.

“Listen, if you need to . . .” She does this awkward head tilt and thumb point in the direction of upstairs, and the pained expression that comes over her makes me sympathy wince.

“What?” I say. “If I need to what?”

“You knowwww.” She drags it out agonizingly. “You might have to . . .
relax
, and I'll just leave you to it. I won't bother—”

“Mom!” I say, and jump up from the table. I instinctively know that I will someday laugh my head off at this, but right now I am far, far too mortified, and so is she.

“I'm sorry,” she says, biting her knuckle. “I was just trying to relieve . . . You look so . . .”

“I'm fine, Mom,” I say, launching into what looks like my pacing pattern but is in fact a roundabout dash for the door.

“Yes,” she says. “That's better anyway. A good brisk walk, that will sort you out.”

Sort me out. By the time I pull the front door closed behind me, I am already almost to the point where I can
laugh. But that's probably more from the relief of escape than anything else.

My mother
always
has my best interest at heart, but we both really need to get out of the house more.

•  •  •

I am standing at the Blues' door again, with the rolled-up portrait of Caligula O'Brien in my hands.

“I thought I threw you out on your ear,” Ronny says, both smiling and snarling. He likes to be displeased.

It's one of the reasons he and I are such a great match.

“I brought a present for my girlfriend,” I say.

“O,” I hear Maxie call from off in the distance. “What are you
do
in'? I told you I'd let you know. You
tryin'
to get the man to punch you in the head?”

“One,” Ronny says, holding up his thumb, “she ain't here. Like I already told you. Two,” he says, adding the pinky finger for styling purposes, “she ain't your girlfriend. And three”—he adds the ring finger, and now I am certain he practices this—“are you
tryin'
to get me to punch you in the head?”

The rain has stopped, but the air is still so heavy with warm damp that it hardly matters, and it doesn't seem like I'll be invited inside anytime soon. I kick anxiously at the concrete two-step of the Blues' stoop, and I persevere.

“I'm not trying to get you to do anything of the kind, Ronny, I assure you, but something's wrong here, I can feel it,
and if I have to take a punch in the head to find out what's going on with Junie, then I am prepared to—”

Bam.

Right in the side of the head. Ronny's unfeasibly big fist with its twelve or thirteen gnarled and calloused knuckles crashes down on me, and I crash right down, on the step, on the sidewalk, on my ass. I feel splits in the structure of my skull, almost making that crackly splintering noise a tree makes when it falls.

But it's only pain.

He stands over me, fists on his hips, lips pursed, growling. Despite what has happened he is somehow the one furious.

“You think you can come here and tell
me
there is something wrong in my own household, and that
you
are here to straighten it out?”

The left side of my head is a busy little airport of pain planes coming and going, fast and noisy and relentless. If it were balanced, even—if both sides of me felt the same—that would be better, but this is making me want to flop sideways and smother it all out.

“Yeah,” I say, perhaps out of sarcasm, or perhaps in an attempt to get him to put me out of my misery, “that's what I think.”

He comes down the two slick concrete steps to the slick sidewalk, where I manage to kind of balance awkwardly on
one hip and an elbow. He crouches, in his shiny gray shorts, crouches like a catcher, and what I catch is the scent of Satan in his crotch, a sulfuric ammonia eau de cologne that makes me say “Oh” and cover my nose the way I should probably be covering up my face against the beating coming my way.

“Do you know who I am?” he hisses.

I nod, keeping it simple in case it's a trick question.

“Do you know who I work for?”

Now I see where he's going, and he doesn't
work
for the guy. He toadies. He's a toad, even among toads, as his own daughter told me on many a shame-filled evening.

“Yes,” I say.

“Well, little rich boy, who, then? Who do I work for?”

I am not rich. Athletes and senators and guys with their own TV churches are rich. Granted, I don't notice how much a shirt costs until the cashier asks for my card, so I'm not exactly hurting. But rich is a whole other category, I think.

“The One,” I say, and maybe it's a mild concussion or the chloroform coming at me from between Ronny's legs, but fear and pain and weakness are fading—I'm sure temporarily.

“The One Who Knows. That's goddamn right, boy.”

“This is good,” I say. “I always wanted to ask somebody, an insider like yourself. What, exactly, is it, that he knows?”

“Ha-
hah
!” Maxine laughs from somewhere not too far off.

“Shut it, Maxine,” Ronny says as he grabs me hard by the
collar in just that way that truly hard, mean, and dangerous people grab.

I will mock, and have mocked, Ronny's intelligence. His hygiene, his style, his overall meaninglessness. But no one will ever hear me mock his toughness. He is the real kind of hard, brutal, vicious, and right now I could well do something that will make me smell as bad as him.

“Leave him alone,” Maxie says, and I realize she is in the doorway. I love Maxine.

“Go in the house,” he says, and while he is as serious and poisonous as ever, I am a little thrilled to hear a small something else in there, something that acknowledges Maxine's
something
. The fact that she is not afraid of him? The fact that there is something of the vicious in her as well?