Lucky You (12 page)

So Demencio hadn’t been alarmed when his wife told him the Madonna was malfunctioning. Usually midweek was slow for business, a good time for an unscheduled dry day. But he’d forgotten about the damn mission bus: sixty-odd Christian pilgrims from Wheeling. The preacher’s name was Mooney or Moody, something like that, and every other year he roared through Florida with new recruits. Trish would bake a lime pie and Demencio would throw in a bottle of scotch, and in return the preacher would entreat his faithful followers to donate generously at Demencio’s shrine. For such a dependable throng, Demencio felt obliged to provide tears.

Thus the Madonna’s hydraulic failure was potentially a crisis. Demencio didn’t want to interrupt the morning visitation to haul the statue indoors for repairs—to do so would arouse suspicion, even among the most devout. Peering through the curtains, Demencio counted nine victims in the front yard, hovering attentively around the icon.

“Got any ideas?” Trish asked.

“Quiet,” said her husband. “Lemme think.”

But it wasn’t quiet. The sounds of crunching filled the room: JoLayne’s cooters, enjoying breakfast.

Demencio’s somber gaze settled on the aquarium. Instead of breaking the romaine into bite-sized pieces, he’d dropped the whole head of lettuce into the tank. The sight of it had pitched the baby turtles into a frenzy, and they were now chewing their way up the leafy slopes.

It was, Demencio had to admit, weirdly impressive. Forty-five marauding turtles. He got an idea. “You still got that Bible?” he asked his wife. “The illustrated one?”

“Somewhere, yeah.”

“And I’ll need some paint,” he said, “like they sell for model airplanes at the hobby store.”

“We only got two hours before the bus.”

“Don’t worry, this won’t take long.” Demencio walked over to the aquarium. He bent down and said: “OK, who wants to be a star?”

10

On the morning of November 28, with rain misting the mountains, Mary Andrea Finley Krome checked out of the Mona Pacifica Mineral Spa and Residential Treatment Center, on the island of Maui. She flew directly to Los Angeles, where the next day she auditioned for a network television commercial for a new home-pregnancy test. Later she flew on to Scottsdale to rejoin the road company for the
Silence of the Lambs
musical, in which she starred as Clarice, the intrepid young FBI agent. Mary Andrea’s itinerary was relayed by certain sources to Tom Krome’s divorce lawyer, Dick Turnquist, who arranged for a process server to be waiting backstage at the dinner theater in Arizona.

Somehow Mary Andrea got word of the ambush. Midway through the finale, with the entire cast and chorus singing,

“Oh, Hannibal the Cannibal, How deliciously malicious you are!”

 
…
Mary Andrea collapsed, convincingly, in a spastic heap. The process server stood back as paramedics strapped the slack-tongued actress on a stretcher and carried her to an ambulance. By the time Dick Turnquist learned the details, Mary Andrea Finley Krome had miraculously regained consciousness, checked herself out of the Scottsdale hospital, rented a Thunderbird and disappeared into the desert.

Dick Turnquist delivered the bad news to Tom Krome via fax, which Krome retrieved at a Kinko’s across the highway from the University of Miami campus. He didn’t read it until he and JoLayne Lucks were parked under a streetlight on what she called the Big Stakeout.

After scanning the lawyer’s report, Krome ripped it into pieces.

JoLayne said: “I know what that woman wants.”

“Me, too. She wants to be married forever.”

“You’re wrong, Tom. She’ll go for a divorce. It has to be her idea, that’s all.”

“Thank you, Dr. Brothers.” Krome didn’t want to think about his future ex-wife because then he would no longer sleep like a puppy. Instead he would awake with marrow-splitting headaches and bleeding gums.

He said, “You don’t understand. This is a sport for Mary Andrea, dodging me and the lawyers. It’s like a competition. Feeds her perverse appetite for drama.”

“Can I ask how much you send her?”

Krome laughed sulfurously.
“Nada.
Not a damn penny! That’s my point, I’ve tried everything: I cut off the monthly checks, canceled the credit cards, closed the joint accounts, forgot her birthday, forgot our anniversary, insulted her mother, slept with other women, grossly exaggerated how many—and still she won’t divorce me. Won’t even come to court!”

JoLayne said, “There’s one thing you didn’t try.”

“It’s against the law.”

“Tell her you’re dating a black girl. That usually does the trick.”

“Mary Andrea couldn’t care less. Hey, check this out.” Tom Krome pointed across the parking lot. “Is that the pickup truck?”

“I’m not sure.” JoLayne sat forward intently. “Could be.”

On the morning the disposable camera arrived in the mail, Katie took it to a one-hour photo studio. Tom had done a pretty good job in Grange: only two pictures of his thumb and several of the Madonna shrine. In the close-ups, the statue’s eyes glistened convincingly.

Katie slipped the photographs in her purse and drove downtown for an early lunch with her husband. In keeping with her new policy of marital sharing and complete openness, she placed the snapshots on the table between the bread basket and the pitcher of sangria.

“Tom kept his promise,” she said, by way of explanation.

Judge Arthur Battenkill Jr. put down his salad fork and thumbed through the pictures. His dullness of expression and pistonlike mastication reminded Katie of a grazing sheep.

He said, “So what the hell is it?”

“The Virgin Mary. The one that cries.”

“Cries.”

“See there?” Katie pointed. “They say she cries real tears.”

“Who
says.”

“It’s a lore, Arthur. That’s all.”

“A crock is more like it.” He handed the photos to his wife. “And your writer boyfriend gave you these?”

Katie said, “I asked him to—and he’s not a boyfriend. It’s over, as I’ve told you a dozen times. We’re through, OK?”

Her husband took a sip of wine. Then, gnawing on a chunk of Cuban bread: “Let me see if I understand. It’s over, but he’s still sending you personal photographs.”

Katie conveyed her annoyance by pinging a spoon against the stem of her wineglass. “You don’t listen very well,” she said, “for a judge.”

Her husband snickered. His poor attitude made Katie wonder if this whole honesty thing was a mistake; with someone as jealous as Arthur, maybe it was wiser to keep a few harmless secrets.

If only he’d make an effort, Katie thought. If only he’d open up the way she had. Out of the blue she asked, “So, how’s Dana?”

Dana was one of the two secretaries whom Judge Arthur Battenkill Jr. was currently screwing.

“She’s just fine,” he said, cool as an astronaut.

“And Willow—she still with that ballplayer?”

Willow was the other secretary, Arthur’s reserve mistress.

“They’re still living together,” the judge reported, “but Oscar’s out of baseball. Torn rotator cuff, something like that.”

“Too bad,” said Katie.

“Maybe it was tendonitis. Anyway, he’s gone back to get his degree. Restaurant management is what Willow said.”

“Good for him,” said Katie, thinking: Enough already about Oscar.

The judge looked pleased when his scrod arrived—baked in a bed of pasta, topped with crabmeat and artichokes. Katie was having the garden quiche, which she picked at listlessly. She hadn’t seriously expected her husband to confess all his adulteries, but it wouldn’t have killed him to admit to one. Willow would’ve been an encouraging start—she was no prize.

Katie said, “You were tossing and turning last night.”

“You noticed.”

“Your stomach again?”

“I got up,” Arthur said, cheeks full, “and reread that remarkable list of yours.”

Uh-oh, thought Katie.

“You and your young man,” he said, swallowing emphatically, “every sordid, raunchy, sweaty detail. I can’t believe you kept count.”

“That’s what truthful confessions are. If I went a little overboard, I’m sorry,” Katie said.

“Thirteen sexual acts in fourteen days!” Her husband, twirling a pale-green noodle onto his fork. “Including three blow jobs—which, by the way, is two more than you’ve given me in the last fourteen
months.”

Talk about keeping count, Katie thought. “Arthur, finish your fish before it gets cold.”

“I don’t understand you, Katherine. After everything I’ve done for you, I get a knife in my heart.”

She said, “Stop. You’re getting worked up over practically nothing.”

“Three blow jobs is not ‘practically nothing.’ “

“You’ve missed the whole point. The whole darn point.” She reached under the table and flicked her husband’s hand off her thigh.

“Your young man,” he said, “where is he now? Lourdes? Jerusalem? Maybe Turin—getting fitted for the shroud!”

“Arthur, he’s not my ‘young man.’ I don’t know where he is. And you, you’re just a hypocritical ass.”

Neatly the judge buffed a napkin across his lips. “I apologize, Katherine. Tell you what, let’s get a room somewhere.”

“You go to hell,” she said.

“Please?”

“On one condition. You quit obsessing about Tommy.”

“It’s a deal,” said Arthur Battenkill Jr. Jovially he waved at the waiter and asked for the check.

A few hours later, Tom Krome’s house blew up.

On the way to breakfast, Bodean Gazzer and Chub stopped to hassle a couple of migrant workers hitchhiking along Highway One. Chub hovered with the .357 while Bode ran through the drill:

Name the fourteenth President of the United States.

Where was the Constitution signed?

Recite the Second Amendment.

Who starred in
Red Dawn?

Personally, Chub was glad he didn’t have to take the same quiz. Evidently the two Mexicans didn’t do so hot, because Bode ordered them in butchered Spanish to show their green cards. Fearfully the men took out their wallets, which Bode emptied in the gravel along the side of the road.

“They legal?” Chub asked.

“They wish.”

With the sharp toe of a boot, Bode kicked through the migrants’ meager belongings—driver’s licenses, farmworker IDs, passport snapshots of children, prayer tabs, postage stamps, bus passes. Chub thought he spotted an immigration card, but Bode ground it to shreds under his heel. Then he removed the cash from the men’s wallets and ordered them to get a move on,
muchachos!

Later, in the truck, Chub asked how much money they’d had.

“Eight bucks between ‘em.”

“Oh, man.”

“Hey, it’s eight bucks that rightfully belongs to white ‘Mericans like us. Fucking illegals, Chub—guess who pays their doctor bills and food stamps? Me and you, that’s who. Billions a dollars every year on aliens.”

As usual, Chub saw no reason to doubt his friend’s knowledge of such matters.

“And I mean
billions,”
Bode Gazzer went on, “so don’t think of it as a robbery, my friend. That was a rebate.”

Chub nodded. “You put it that way, sure.”

When they returned from the 7-Eleven, they found an unfamiliar car parked crookedly near Chub’s trailer. It was a sanded-down Chevrolet Impala; an old one, too. One of Chub’s counterfeit handicapped permits hung from the rearview.

“Easy does it,” said Chub, pulling the gun from his belt.

The door of the trailer was open, the TV blaring. Bode cupped his hands to his mouth: “Get your ass out here, whoever you are! And keep your goddamn hands in the air!”

Shiner appeared, shirtless and stubbly-bald, in the doorway. He wore the grin of a carefree idiot. “I’m here!” he proclaimed.

At first Bode and Chub didn’t recognize him.

Hey,” Shiner said, “it’s me—your new white brother. Where’s the militia?”

Chub lowered the pistol. “The fuck you do to yourself, boy?”

“Shaved my hair off.”

“May I ast why?”

“So I can be a skinhead,” Shiner replied.

Bodean Gazzer whistled. “No offense, son, but it ain’t your best look.”

The problem was with Shiner’s scalp: an angry latitudinal scar, shining like a hideous stamp on the pale dome of his head.

Chub asked Shiner if he’d gotten branded by some wild Miami niggers or Cubans.

“Nope. I fell asleep on a crankcase.”

Bode crossed his arms. “And this crankcase,” he said, “was it still in the car?”

“Yessir, with the engine runnin’.” Shiner did his best to explain: The mishap had occurred almost two years earlier on a Saturday afternoon. He’d had a few beers, a couple joints, maybe half a roofie, when he decided to tune the Impala. He’d started the car, opened the hood and promptly passed out headfirst on the engine block.

“Fucker heated up big-time,” Shiner said.

Chub couldn’t stand it. He went in the trailer to take a shit, turn off the television and hunt down a cold Budweiser. When he came out he saw Bode Gazzer sitting next to Shiner on the front fender of the Chevy.

Bode waved him over. “Hey, our boy done exactly what we told him.”

“How’s that?”

“The Negro girl come to his house askin’ about the Lotto ticket.”

“She sure did,” Shiner said, “and I said it wasn’t her that won it. I said she must of got confused with another Saturday.”

Chub said, “Good man. What’d she do next?”

“Got all pissed and run off out the door. She’s beat up pretty bad, too. That was you guys, I figgered.”

Bode prodded Shiner to finish the story. “Tell about how you quit your job at the store.”

“Oh yeah, Mr. Singh, he said I couldn’t park with the handicaps even though I got the blue wheelchair dealie on the mirror. So what I done, I grabbed my back pay from the cash register and hauled ass.”

Bode added: “Took the security video, too. Just like we told him.”

“Yeah, I hid it in the glove box.” Shiner jerked his head toward the Impala.

“Slick move,” said Chub, winking his good eye. In truth, he wasn’t especially impressed with Shiner, and Gazzer, too, had doubts. The boy manifested the sort of submissive dimness that foretold a long sad future in minimum-security institutions.

“Look here,” Shiner said, flexing his doughy left arm. “Radical new tattoo:
W.R.B.
To make it official.”

Over the rim of his beer can, Chub shot Bode a look that said:
You
tell him.

“So how’s it look?” Shiner asked brightly. “Seventy-five bucks, ‘case you guys want one, too.”

Bode slid off the fender and brushed the rust marks off the butt of his camo trousers. “Thing is, we had to change the name.”