Maggy's Child (5 page)

Scorning the path, Bridey and Seamus bounded ahead through the undergrowth, barking joyously as they chased squirrels and leaves and shadows and anything else that had the poor judgment to move. They knew the morning routine as well as she did, and Maggy had no fear that they would get lost. Most of the twenty acres of the estate was surrounded by a three-foot-high stone wall, with another two feet of iron fence set into the top of that. As the high-profile owner and publisher of
Kentucky Today
, the venerable part-gossip, part-news magazine that had been commenting on personalities and events of interest to Kentuckians for nearly a hundred years, Lyle was careful about security, and the fence and gated entry were part of his precautions. There were always threats, especially when Lyle personally wrote editorials espousing unpopular views. But he had not written any new ones lately, and so, with just the normal degree of hate simmering in the minds and hearts of Lyle’s enemies, Maggy really had no fears of being attacked on her own property.

Which was why, when she saw the glowing red tip of a cigarette in a patch of shadows near the path, she kept walking toward it for a couple of paces before registering that, yes, there really was a man leaning against the trunk of a large ginkgo tree, taking a long drag from a cigarette as he watched her approach.

Maggy stopped dead. In the distance, the dogs started to bay as one or the other of them scented a rabbit and took off in hot pursuit. Where she was, the woods seemed very still suddenly. Not so much as a leaf rustled.

“Good morning, Magdalena.”

She had known who it was even before he stepped away from the tree and spoke: Nick. Her heart, which had speeded up in response to fear of the unknown, continued to pound with another kind of fear as Nick tossed his cigarette on the damp path, crushed it out with a
sneakered foot, and came toward her. Fine beads of moisture glinted in his black hair as he walked through a shaft of gossamer sunlight that shimmered between them. More drops of moisture gleamed on the shoulders of his tan car coat. Like her, he wore well-worn jeans, though his fit the hard muscles of his thighs like a glove. The ancient-looking canvas sneakers on his feet were thoroughly wet, which suggested to Maggy that he had been prowling through the woods for some time.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

Despite an initial impulse to turn and run, Maggy stood her ground as he approached her and stopped just a couple of feet away where the path was dark and cool. A woodpecker suddenly began its distinctive hammering somewhere high above, but beyond casting a cursory glance upward neither of them paid it the least attention.

“That’s the second time you’ve asked me that. If you’d stuck around last night, I just might have given you an answer. Now I think I’m going to let you figure it out for yourself.” He smiled at her, but it wasn’t a pleasant smile.

“Nick …” she began desperately, only to be sidetracked when he reached into his pocket, pulled out a rectangular package wrapped in plain brown paper and held it out to her.

“Happy birthday, Magdalena.” His voice was dry.

“What is it?” Maggy accepted the package gingerly, turning it over in her hands as she stared down at it. It weighed very little, but there was something about the expression on his face that warned her to be wary. Oh, the signs were subtle, the merest crease in his forehead and glint in his eyes, but she had known him too well: whatever was in this package was not something she was going to like.

“A thirtieth-birthday present from me to you.” He reached into his coat, fished in an inside pocket, and extracted a pack of Winstons and a book of matches. Tapping
out a cigarette, he returned the pack to his pocket then lit the one he held with a flick of a match.

“You never used to smoke.” Maggy was surprised at the disapproval she felt as she watched him. For an instant, just an instant, she was the young Magdalena again, and Nick was her mentor and her world. The girl that she had been then would have snatched the cigarette from his mouth and stomped it underfoot, treating him to an angry tirade as she did so. But then, the boy he had been would never have smoked. He hadn’t been an angel, but he had never done drugs, never gotten drunk, never smoked. In his vicinity, at least, she’d never done those things either. Nick would have tanned her backside if he’d caught her the few times she had experimented with alcohol and pot behind his back—or at least he would have tried. She would have put up a heck of a fight.

Ah, Nick. Her heart ached suddenly for what might have been. If only—if only—but the die was cast and her path chosen with no possibility of turning back. She’d made her choice twelve years before, and now she had to live with the consequences no matter how painful she might find them.

Another of
Tia
Gloria’s sayings was that the wheels of God grind slow, but they grind incredibly small. She felt as if they were grinding her into particles smaller than dust at that very moment.

“I never used to do a whole hell of a lot of things,” Nick replied, returning the matches to his pocket and nodding at the package in her hand. “Aren’t you going to open it?”

The glint in his eyes warned her again to be on guard even as her fingers ripped clumsily at the paper. And just as well, too, because what spilled into her hand as the paper tore were a videotape, a folded yellow business-size envelope—and four three-by-five, full-color photos of herself at seventeen, dancing nude.

She dropped the package as if it were a live snake. As
the contents scattered around her feet, she stared down at the one picture that landed faceup with as much dreadful fascination as if it were a cobra poised to strike.

In it she was onstage in a dive that made the Little Brown Cow seem the epitome of class and sophistication. Her arms, raised over her head, sexily lifted away from her body the heavy fall of red-tinted mahogany hair that then cascaded in lush waves down past her hips. Her skin was pale as alabaster, her mouth pouty, her eyes heavy-lidded and dreamy from the pot she had smoked to get the courage to do what she needed to do to earn the hundred dollars the manager had promised her
every night
. There was a fortune to be made, or at least it had seemed a fortune to the girl she had been then, if she would only dance naked except for a satiny G-string six nights a week for an audience of thirty to fifty drooling men.

They weren’t allowed to touch her in the bar—the manager had explained that the owner was afraid of losing his liquor license, and so the rule was strictly enforced—and whether or not she “dated” a customer for more money after her performance was over was strictly up to her. She’d known she never would, so she wouldn’t be a whore. She would be only dancing, nothing more.

Thus she had persuaded herself, convinced that in the long run the money would be worth the shame that had twisted her insides whenever she had allowed her imagination to take her as far as actually getting up on that stage. She would make nearly four times the money dancing as she did working split shifts as a waitress at the Harmony Inn, where she got decent tips only on Tuesday nights because of the all-you-can-eat fish special. It would be stupid not to take the job, she told herself with her customary hardheaded practicality, stupid not to cash in on her young, lithe body and pretty face while they were still there to be cashed in on. Yet she couldn’t tell Nick what she meant to do, though he was her best friend and
her closest family all rolled into one and she told him everything else. Nick would hit the roof if he knew.

When the time actually came for her debut performance on a less than crowded Thursday night, she never would have been able to go through with it if another dancer, more inured to the life, hadn’t taken pity on her obvious fright and gotten her high as a kite first.

For three whole nights, she’d been one of the nine beautiful girls and three ugly ones (or so the newspaper ads described them) who had comprised the stable of dancers at the Pink Pussycat. Each night she’d vomited from nerves as she’d gotten ready for her performance, and each night she’d thought she couldn’t possibly go out there on that stage again. Smoking grass had gotten her through it. All the girls did, passing joints back and forth as they applied body makeup in the tiny rest room that served as their dressing room. Maggy had deliberately inhaled until she was comfortably lost somewhere in space. Only then had she been able to go on.

Stoned, it hadn’t been so terribly hard. She’d felt she was floating as she walked out on the tiny stage and the bright stage lights hit her, all but blinding her. At first it had been easy to pretend she was alone, undressing to music in the privacy of her apartment. The pounding rhythm of the rock anthem “Born to Be Wild” had swelled until it seemed to be right inside her brain, and she had moved instinctively to its beat. For her entrance, her hair was piled high atop her head by one of the other girls. She began her act by removing the pins from the heavy mass and shaking it loose. Then she slowly untied the sash of the scarlet, feather-trimmed robe that was the outermost part of her costume. That first night, when she felt the silk of the robe slide down her arms to puddle at her feet and realized that she was almost completely naked beneath, she suffered an attack of fear and modesty acute enough to pierce the drugged fog that shielded her. Panic assailed her as, dressed in nothing but high heels, black
thigh-high stockings, and a black sequined G-string, she faced the audience of dozens of drooling, clapping men. She had glanced down, been confronted with the hard pink tips of her bare breasts and the naked curve of her belly and thighs—and had nearly died of shame on the spot. Quickly, instinctively, she whipped around so that her back was to them, then tilted her chin toward the dusty rafters overhead, because she knew that if she did, her long hair would fall low enough to hide her bare butt. Somehow her feet kept moving in the semblance of a dance while she prayed for deliverance and the audience alternately cheered and booed. The manager hissed furiously at her from the wings—she had to show them
something
—and as she glanced his way her hair had apparently shifted enough to afford the audience a glimpse of the naked cheeks of her behind. The crowd roared approval. Startled, she glanced around at them, affording them another peek. They howled for more. The manager hissed at her again, making frantic turning motions with his hands, inscribing a horizontal circle in the air. Her drug-dulled wits froze, then gave up the struggle for independence. Nauseated with fear, she obediently turned around—but shook her hair forward so that it covered her breasts. The manager growled. The audience stomped its feet. Frightened to death of both him and the crowd, Maggy closed her eyes to shut them all out and swayed to the beat, trying not to hear the thunderous mixture of catcalls and stomping feet and clapping hands that greeted her amateur gyrations. The manager hissed again—“
Show them some skin!
”—and Maggy’s eyes opened. She was out there onstage, there was no way off except past the angry manager on one side and a burly bouncer on the other or through the crowd itself, and if she didn’t perform she wouldn’t be paid.…

Getting paid was what it was all about, after all.

Suddenly the crowd was silent. The men licked their lips and sweated and stared as Maggy slid both arms under
her hair and lifted the glistening curtain of waves, then dropped it, over and over again, in a somnolent, sensuous sleepwalker’s dance born somewhere in her subconscious. The watching men went wild, but the commotion just barely penetrated the haze of nauseated fear and pot that blunted her senses like an anesthetic. Her body was there, dancing nearly naked for money, but she, the part of her that was Magdalena, was not.

On her third night, a busy Saturday, Nick walked in during the middle of her performance. She found out later that he’d been tipped off to what she was doing by one of his friends. When he appeared, she was down to her heels and stockings and G-string, her thick fall of hair all that protected her modesty. Her back was turned to the audience, so she didn’t see him when he entered and threaded his way between the crowded tables, didn’t see him when he stopped directly in front of the stage, arms crossed over his chest, staring up at her as—once, twice, three times—she lifted her hair and wiggled her bare butt, as he put it later, for all the world to see. Largely over her initial stage fright by that time and high as a kite, she turned around as the audience roared for more and smiled sleepily into the closest pair of male eyes—only to come to the slow, awful realization that they were blazing green with outrage and all too familiar.

Nick.

Shocked sober, she had frozen where she stood. With a single lithe movement Nick jumped up onstage beside her, snatched up her robe from the floor, wrapped it around her body, and picked her up over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, all without saying so much as a word to her.

Then all hell had broken loose. The Pink Pussycat didn’t take kindly to having its dancers snatched from its stage right before its patrons’ eyes. By the time the melee was over, twenty-year-old Nick had battled his way through the club’s three massive bouncers and about a
dozen other assorted pugilists, suffered two black eyes, a bloodied nose, and bruised ribs, and barely escaped being arrested when Maggy dragged him out the door just ahead of the arrival of the cops, who were called to quell the disturbance.

And was he grateful? Not he!

Roaring away from the club in his ancient car—Maggy was driving, though as she told him he didn’t deserve that she should go to so much bleeping trouble to save his ass—they had had the mother and father of a quarrel. If Nick hadn’t been so bloody and battered, Maggy would have slapped him silly herself. Mind your own damned business, she screamed at him. She could do what the hell she wanted with her life and her body! If she wanted to dance naked in the middle of the expressway at high noon, she would! His response, as he’d tilted his head back against the seat and tried to stanch the blood that poured from his nose, was to call her a stupid little fool and tell her to slow down.